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• No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.

• When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love.

• When all hopes of recognition or honor have faded into distant memory, when purity of heart meets sorrow of mind, when all the world seems to walk in blindness and yet a man works without wearying for that which he loves...only in this moment is passion truly understood.

About Franz Schubert

• Another equally true saying of Schumann is that, compared with Beethoven, Schubert is as a woman to a man. For it must be confessed that one's attitudes towards him is almost always that of sympathy, attraction, and love, rarely that of embarrassment or fear. Here and there only, as in the Rosamund B minor Entr'acte, or the Finale of the 10th symphony, does he compel his listeners with an irrestistible power; and yet how different is this compulsion from the strong, fierce, merciless coercion, with which Beethoven forces you along, and bows and bends you to his will.
  • Sir George Grove, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn (London:Macmillan, 1951), p. 238.