What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

A passion for music is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day.

Bach was quarrelsome, litigious, self-serving, greedy for titles and honors, etc. So what! A musicologist listing the cantatas whose theme is death has remarked that no mortal ever had such a nostalgia for it. Which is all that counts. The rest has to do with biography.

I cannot differentiate between tears and music' (Nietzsche). Whoever is not immediately struck by the profundity of this statement has not lived for a minute in the intimacy of music. I know no other music than that of tears. Born out of the loss of paradise, music gives birth to the symbols of this loss: tears.

Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure.