Ah, music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!

Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice . . . . Truth breaks free, science is popularized, and religion totters soon it will fall, in the course of centuries--that is, tomorrow. . . . In good time we shall only have to deal with reason.

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche commenting on the music of Georges Bizet: His music has the tang of sunny climates, their bracing air, their clearness. It voices a sensibility hitherto unknown to us.

I lived in Italy for three years and wanted no part of the country's disreputable way of life.