“I urge pupils when studying a work and in order to master its most important aspic, the rhythmic structure, or the ordering of the time process, to do just what a conductor does with the score: to place music on the desk and to conduct the work from beginning to end as if it were played by someone else, an imaginary pianist with the conductor trying to impress him with his will, his tempo first of all, plus all the details of his performance.”

“Everyone is aware of the fact that visual and auditive perspective are identical; the only difference being that they are created and perceived by two physically different organs, the eye and the ear. How often the playing of a great master makes us think of a picture with a deep background and varying planes; the figures in the foreground almost leap out of the frame whereas in the background the mountains and clouds are lost in a blue haze.”

“It is only by demanding the impossible of the piano that you can obtain from it all that is possible. For the psychologist this means that imagination and desire are ahead of the possible reality. A deaf Beethoven created for the piano sounds never heard before and thus predetermined the development of the piano for several decades to come. The composer's creative spirit imposes on the piano rules to which it gradually conforms. That is the history of the instrument's development. I don't know of any case where the reverse occurred.”

“The notion that one must know history in order to understand the present has a certain justification when applied to the history of events, but not for the structural history of society. Rather, the opposite is the case: to examine the *constitution* of a particular social and economic structure, one has to be already familiar with the *completed* structure. Only then will one know what to look for in history.”

“The history of Immanuel Kant's life is difficult to portray, for he had neither life nor history. He led a mechanical, regular, almost abstract bachelor existence in a little retired street of Königsberg, an old town on the north-eastern frontier of Germany. I do not believe that the great clock of the cathedral performed in a more passionless and methodical manner its daily routine than did its townsman, Immanuel Kant. Rising in the morning, coffee-drinking, writing, reading lectures, dining, walking, everything had its appointed time, and the neighbors knew that it was exactly half-past three o'clock when Kant stepped forth from his house in his grey, tight-fitting coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand, and betook himself to the little linden avenue called after him to this day the "Philosopher's Walk." Summer and winter he walked up and down it eight times, and when the weather was dull or heavy clouds prognosticated rain, the townspeople beheld his servant, the old Lampe, trudging anxiously behind Kant with a big umbrella under his arm, like an image of Providence.What a strange contrast did this man's outward life present to his destructive, world-annihilating thoughts! In sooth, had the citizens of Königsberg had the least presentiment of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt far more awful dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of an executioner, who can but kill the body. But the worthy folk saw in him nothing more than a Professor of Philosophy, and as he passed at his customary hour, they greeted him in a friendly manner and set their watches by him.”

“With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.”

“The Servant who really studies his Master gradually becomes like his master; gradually learns that he himself is the one who in the end does all the work and has all the power.”