I wanted to get away from my past and everything connected with it.

Mozart makes you believe in God because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces.

The joy of working with the Chicago Symphony was immeasureable.

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

Everyone says you have to be a specialist, and if you conduct Wagner you cannot conduct Mozart - this is nonsense.

The academy gave me a grounding in discipline and hard work that has sustained me throughout my life, and the lessons I learned there I now try to impress on young people.

The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.

My entire learning process is slow, because I have no visual memory.

Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find.

I can only hope that neither of them was scarred by their upbringing.

The pen is mightier than the sword unless it's a real sword in which case the guy with the pen should run away fast.

We’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.

I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.

Perhaps it was the approach of death that had opened his eyes wide and made him see so clearly.

As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.

You are what you eat, but eventually you become what eats you.

After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.

But though cognition is not an element of mental action, nor even in any real sense of the word an aspect of it, the distinction of cognition and conation has if properly defined a definite value.

There's always a price for what you want.

President Obama celebrates diversity, yet instinctively seeks common ground and builds on that common ground to make progress.