“You have to remain critically vigilant.Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious.”

“we often refuse to accept an idea merely because the way in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.”

“Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.”

“In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.”

“A rebel can be a miserable and contemptible man; but there is nothing contemptible in a revolt as such - and to be a rebel in view of contemporary society does not in itself lower the value of a man. There are even cases in which one might have to honour a rebel,because he finds something in our society against which war ought to be waged - he wakens us from our slumber.”

“Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest. ”

“Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.”