“Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.”

Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

The profound meaning of music’s essential aim, is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being.

I never understood the need for a “live” audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

I am an inventor of music.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one.

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

We either stay sick together or we get well together.

When Americans lend a hand to one another, nothing is impossible.

There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.

When love has fused and mingled two beings in sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned.

Choose unity over division.

Love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.

The Holy Spirit loves to shape unity from the most beautiful and harmonious diversity.

In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.