Every musical phrase has a purpose. It's like talking. If you talk with a particular purpose, people listen to you, but if you just recite, it's not as meaningful.

One of the most important elements in teaching, conducting, and performing, all three, is listening.

Sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.

Never miss an opportunity to teach; when you teach others, you teach yourself.

One must always practice slowly. If you learn something slowly, you forget it slowly.

Another thing that I don't like to do is show too much how it goes. I do it once in a blue moon. Sometimes there are lessons when I don't pick up a violin at all.

The most important thing to do is really listen.

Ask many of us who are disabled what we would like in life and you would be surprised how few would say, 'Not to be disabled.' We accept our limitations.

I always consider myself lucky that I can actually cry listening to some music.

When you play a concerto with a small orchestra, you don't feel it is as important as Carnegie Hall. You try to work out all the little problems. Once that's all done, trust comes in.

For every child prodigy that you know about, at least 50 potential ones have burned out before you even heard about them.

Learn from the past, but don't live there, Plan the future, but don’t live there. Remember the Present is where we truly spend the rest of our lives.

The most precious gift you can ever give to a young woman is, appreciating and understanding her true feelings

Progress might have been all right once but it's gone on too long.

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself in spite of being unacceptable.

The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts and we grow happier as we grow older.

I think that the very earliest influence was a horror of having to work in a bank or an office, a desire for a free and creative life.

The future is bulletproof The aftermath is secondary.

The Forbidden Forest looked as though it had been enchanted, each tree smattered with silver, and Hagrid's cabin looked like an iced cake.

I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.

I loved fencing and dancing and elocution.