To render my works properly requires a combination of extreme precision and irresistible verve, a regulated vehemence, a dreamy tenderness, and an almost morbid melancholy.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Music and love are the wings of the soul.

Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love

It is not enough that the artist should be well prepared for the public. The public must be well prepared for what it is going to hear.

The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.

Only by pairing knowledge with inspiration will art evolve. Without these conditions any musician will remain a flawed artist, if one may speak of an artist at all.

Bach is Bach just as God is God.

Time, time - that is our greatest master! Alas, like Ugolino, time devours its own children.

The organizational fit is the good balance of the fitting attitude and misfit thinking.

The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.

The best proof that there's intelligent life in the universe is that it hasn't come here.

Truthfulness is the main element of character.

Times change: it was once the custom to take a bath weekly and religion daily.

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.

I love conventional apocalypse movies. In movies, I like to be with the President, or the scientist trying to solve the problem, but that's not the kind of fiction that I like to read.

All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, Jesus himeself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.

If riches increase, let thy mind hold pace with them; and think it not enough to be liberal, but munificent.