Great Throughts Treasury

"Love is born of faith, lives on hope, and dies of charity."

"Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did not do... For me, the conception of hell lies in two words: “too late.”"

"Melody is a form of remembrance. It must have a quality of inevitability in our ears. "

"Waiting and hoping are the whole of life, and as soon as a dream is realized it is destroyed. "

"A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance."

"Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out."

"Fate has blessed me. But if there's one thing I regret, it's this accursed festival. It's robbed too much of my time from composition and from the chance to just be curious about life, art and philosophy. Suddenly there's no time left, and it makes me feel desperate."

"Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding."

"I feel like the sorcerer's apprentice I've started something and I don't know how to stop it."

"I started Spoleto because I did not want to be the marginal person, the entertainer. I wanted to have a community, to be part of a community."

"I needed to feel that I was needed. Thirty years ago, Spoleto was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now it's a flourishing town that owes its life to the festival."