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

There is nothing boring in life except ourselves.

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

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.

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

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

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.