Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos. – Gustav Mahler
A true personality . . . is like a robust organism that, with unconscious sureness, seeks out and digests the nourishment appropriate to it and vigorously rejects that which is unsuitable. – Gustav Mahler
The point is not to take the worlds opinion as a guiding star but to go ones way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause. – Gustav Mahler
I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow’s feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong. – George Bernard Shaw, to Mrs. Patrick Campbell