All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish.

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos.

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.

The point is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.

I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.

If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster.

For the sake of your health and happiness, replace the loss that causes sadness with the thanks that yields gratitude.

To stop working, striving and pushing, just because you have enough, therefore is a disservice to the Divine.

He who would travel happy must travel lite.

One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic.

To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission.

I never lost the taste and craft of the Renaissance.

We may be sinking in the North Atlantic in the most famous ship disaster of all time, but God can still use us to reach out and save others through our witness.

Average Americans, middle-class citizens, just feel disenfranchised by our government. And they feel particularly unhappy by what is perceived as business-as-usual politics in Washington.

One writes to teach, to move or to delight.

It's important to every American that the law protect his or her basic liberty