Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.

Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.

As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.

I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.

The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.

Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.

The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.