“We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.”

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.

What force is more potent than love?

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.

Music is the coordination between man and time.

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.

Hope is a slow business.

He means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow.

But that is the only thing that slows me down is the system. No one, two or three was big enough to slow me down, only the system. It was the system that slowed me down to make my numbers fall. Not because I am older.

Now that I’m an old, old veteran-age 29-I do things a lot differently. I don’t go to the gentlemen’s clubs anymore. I had to slow that down.

I’m like a chameleon. I adapt to my situation. It’s very slowed down here. I like it that way. I’m a guy that’s very reserved, quiet and shy myself.

Baseball is the favorite American sport because it’s so slow. Any idiot can follow it. And just about any idiot can play it.

Is a slow but accelerating impact with consequences that will greatly overshadow all the oil spills put together. The warming trend that is CO2-related will overshadow all the oil spills that have ever occurred put together.

Banks are slowly but surely lending again, and never again will taxpayers foot the bill for Wall Street’s excesses. In case we forgot, that was the change we believed in. That was the change we fought for. That was the change President Obama delivered.