In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.

The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.

Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.

Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.

I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.

From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.