It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.

tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.

Music is the perfect type of art.

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.