Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful life, it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bringing us back pure and new to what was, what will be, what music has created for us.

The history of harmony is the history of the development of the human ear, which has gradually assimilated, in their natural order, the successive intervals of the harmonic series.

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.

Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.

It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.

Never forget that your days are blessed. You may know how to profit by them, or you may not, but they are blesses.

Art is not emotion. Art is the medium in which emotion is expressed.