“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.”

“Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long?”

“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.”

“I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.”

“Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.”

“Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one's heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flower...”

“Is there magic in this world? Certainly! But it is not the kind of magic written about in fantasy stories. It is the kind of magic that comes from ideas and the hard work it often takes to make the...”

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

“A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking.”