“As long as I have health and strength, I will gladly work all my days.”

“I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, but I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them.”

“Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.”

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

“Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.”

“Kalkbrenner has made me an offer; that I should study with him for three years, and he will make something really - really out of me. I answered that I know how much I lack; but that I cannot explo...”

“If you want to be happy, work with all your heart.”

“I do my best thinking at night when everyone else is sleeping. No interruptions. No noise. I like the feeling of being awake when no one else is.”

“I feel like Ive been split open and stuffed with sunshine.”

“When man will return to nature, nature will return to him.”

“The sky is an enormous man.”

“When the full-grown poet came,Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unr...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”