My heart pounds sickeningly and I turn pale... I often feel as if I were dead... I seem to be losing my mind.

You should neither play bad compositions, nor, unless compelled, listen to them.

My indifference to money and my spendthrift ways are disgraceful. You have no idea how reckless I am; how often I practically throw money out of the window. I am always making good resolutions, but the next minute I forget and give the waiter eightpence.

When you play, do not trouble yourself as to who is listening. Yet always play as though a master listened to you.

Nature best teaches how to pray, and how to reverence all the gifts the Almighty has given us. She is like a vast outspread handkerchief, embroidered with God's eternal name, on which we may dry alike our tears of sorrow and of joy; she turns weeping into ecstasy, and fills our hearts with speechless, quiet reverence and resignation.

Music owes as much to Bach as religion to its founder.

My whole life has been a twenty years struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law.