 Art is the most beautiful of all lies. |
| People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception? |
| Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light. |
| Music is the silence between the notes. |
| The century of airplanes has a right to its own music. |
| A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn. |
| Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art. |
| How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling. |
| The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen. |
| Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part. |
| I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child. |
| Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory. |
| First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers. |
| There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature. |
| Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes. |
| Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. |
| I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. |
| In opera, there is always too much singing. |
| Extreme complication is contrary to art. |
