Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

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.

I hate you, Richard Wagner . . . but I hate you on my knees.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great.