Two years of close association with some of the best (as well as some of the worst) tunes in the world was a better musical education than any amount of sonatas and fugues.

Why should we not enter into our inheritance in the church as well as the concert hall?

Have we not all about us forms of a musical expression which we can take and purify and raise to the level of great art?.

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

The great men of music close periods; they do not inaugurate them. The pioneer work, the finding of new paths, is left to smaller men.

Wagner used to read the libretti of his operas to his friends; I am glad I was not there.

To the unmusical hearer a note on the gong means dinner, this perhaps often is menacing enough.