“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa Lobos?

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.

Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!

To continue in one path is to go backward.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

Here’s a nation, one of the founding pillars was freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And yet, we have imposed upon people restrictions on what they can say, on what they can think. And the media is the largest proponent of this, crucifying people who say things really quite innocently.

Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos.

Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

The U.S. – the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that’s hardly even a joke.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.

We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.