Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer.

On Beethoveven’s Seventh Symphony:

What can you do with it? It’s like a lot of yaks jumping about.

Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer.

You can’t have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers: They simply define what music is!

I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven.

What is beautiful in science is the same thing that is beautiful in Beethoven. There’s a fog of events and suddenly you see a connection. It expresses a complex of human concerns that goes deeply to you, that connects things that were always in you that were never put together before.

Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.