“Music is either sacred or profane. What is sacred accords completely with its nobility, and this is where music most immediately influences life; such influence remains unchanged at all times and in every epoch. Profane music should be altogether cheerful.Music of a kind that mixes the sacred with the profane is godless and shoddy music wich goes in for expressing feeble, wretched, deplorable feelings, and is just insipid. For it is not serious enough to be sacred and it lacks the chief quality of the opposite kind: cheerfulness.”

“15"General ideas and great conceit are always a fair way to bring about terrible misfortune.”

“There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they find to laugh at.”

“Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbartThe human power is revealed by poetIl potere dell'umanità si rivela nel poeta”

“We are all pilgrims who seek Italy.”

“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”

“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.”

“In all things it is better to hope than to despair.”

“By Fortune's adverse buffets overborneTo solitude I fled, to wilds forlorn,And not in utter loneliness to live,Myself at last did to the Devil give!”

“If I wasn't a devil myself I'd give Me up to the Devil this very minute.”

“My father, my father, and dost thou not hearThe words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?'Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.”