The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at ….

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion..

To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them..

It is nothing to succeed if one has not taken great trouble, and it is nothing to fail if one has done the best one could..

There is nothing boring in life except ourselves..

Without order there can be no inner satisfaction. Without inner satisfaction there can be no freedom. Without freedom there is no joy..

Without a strong cup to carry the emotion, it is only a curiosity. Great art can come to us only in strong cups. Without emotion, there is nothing to….

It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of though….

The history of harmony is the history of the development of the human ear, which has gradually assimilated, in their natural order, the successive in….

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece..

Art is not emotion. Art is the medium in which emotion is expressed..

As far as the execution is concerned ... the most frequent and most serious mistake is to follow the music instead of preceding it..

Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest s….

Do nothing for effect. Do it for truth..

Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains..

Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits o….

[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've ….

I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't….

Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so..

False notes can be forgiven, false music cannot..

Music was not invented by the composer, but found..