Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Don't regard yourself as too divine to improve, occasionally, your own works.

Händel is the greatest and ablest of all composers; from him I can still learn.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you. Oh how harshly was I flung back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing.

Everything should be at once surprising and inevitable.

What is to reach the heart must come from above; if it does not come from thence, it will be nothing but notes, body without spirit.