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.

Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains.

Everything we know by heart enriches us and helps us find ourselves. If it should get in the way of finding ourselves, it is because we have no personality.

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.

It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.

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.