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

It is easier to analyze a work in its form, in its evolution, than simply to love it with all the living forces of our heart. It is easier to define its peculiarities and its details than to draw out of it its emotion, its thought.

Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.

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.

In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity; solitude is accompanied by a new hope between pity for ourselves - which makes us more indulgent and more understanding - and the certitude of finding something again, that which lives for ever in music.

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