[On the music of Richard Strauss:] Too many notes!

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

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.

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.

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.

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.

Without a strong cup to carry the emotion, it is only a curiosity. Great art can come to us only in strong cups. Without emotion, there is nothing to carry.