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

[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.

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

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.

I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.

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.

Without order there can be no inner satisfaction. Without inner satisfaction there can be no freedom. Without freedom there is no joy.