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

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.

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

I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.

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

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.