»After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant and fills one with the sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.«

»If one hears bad music it is one’s duty to drown it by one’s conversation.«

»Music makes one feel so romantic – at least it always gets on one’s nerves – which is the same thing nowadays.«

»Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.«

»Music is the art […] which most completely realizes the artistic idea, and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.«

»Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb ate the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.«

»Die Musik ist der vollkommenste Typus der Kunst: Sie verrät nie ihr letztes Geheimnis.«