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

It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits.

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.

The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.

It is nothing to succeed if one has not taken great trouble, and it is nothing to fail if one has done the best one could.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

As far as the execution is concerned ... the most frequent and most serious mistake is to follow the music instead of preceding it.