Richard Wagner commenting on the music of Ludvig Van Beethoven: He was a Titan, wrestling with the Gods.

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

He that divines the secret of my music is freed from the unhappiness that haunts the whole world of men.

Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.

Everything should be at once surprising and inevitable.

You ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with certainty. They come unsummoned, directly, indirectly - I could seize them with my hands - out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, in the silence of the nights, at dawn, excited by moods which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound and roar and storm about me till I have set them down in notes.