Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

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.

And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows.