- I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance
- The first thing to do in life is to do with purpose what one purposes to do
- The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him
- The heart of the melody can never be put down on paper
- To retire is to begin to die
- Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage . . . to listen to his own goodness
- In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.
- Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
- Bach is the supreme genius of music... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.
- I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.
- The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
- Music should serve a purpose; it should be a part of something much more larger, a part of humanity.
- The cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful.
- We ought to think that we are the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all of humanity. We cannot live without the others, and especially without the tree.
- Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.
- The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.
- Beauty is all about us, but how many are blind! They look at the wonder of this earth and seem to see nothing. People move hectically but give little thought to where they are going. They seek excitement ... as if they were lost and desperate.
- To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine; such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment in music of all time.
- The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.
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