It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.