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

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass.

The duty of the words is to say just as much as the music has left unsaid and no more.

Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

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.

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.