“My compositions spring from my sorrows. Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest griefs.”

“No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.”

“I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.”

“Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wife.”

“There is no such thing as happy music.”

“I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.”

“I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.”