... Chopin's genius is the deepest, the most sensitive and the most emotional in existence. He made a single instrument speak the language of the infinite; often he could concentrate into ten lines, which any child can play, poetry of immense loftiness and drama of unequalled action. He needed no complex material means to lend his genius a voice: no saxophones nor ophicleides to fill the soul with terror; no church organs, nor vox humana to fill it with faith and enthusiasm. The crowd did not know him and still [following his death] does not know him. Great progress in taste and artistic perception is needed before his works can become popular. But the day is not far off when they will orchestrate his music without changing his piano parts, and when all the world will recognise that though his genius was no less vast, complete, and learned than that of the great masters whose works he had assimilated, nevertheless his individuality remained even more exquisite than Bach's, more powerful than Beethoven's, more dramatic than Weber's. He is all three of them together, yet still himself, that is to say more delicate in his taste, more austere in his power, more piercing in his sorrow. Only Mozart is superior ...

Chopin was aware both of his strength and of his weakness. His weakness lay in an uncontrollable excess of power. He could not paint a masterpiece with flat tints as Mozart - but only Mozart - could do. His music was full of unexpected nuances and, on occasions, bizarre, mysterious, tormented. Though he had a horror of the unintelligible, his excess of emotion carried him unwittingly into regions that he alone knew to exist. I may have been a bad critic for him - because, by knowing him so well, I had managed to identify myself with all the fibres of his being. For eight years [circa 1838/39-45/46] during which I was initiated, day by day, into the secret of his inspiration and musical brooding, Chopin's piano revealed to me the joys, obstacles and tortures of his thought. In the end I understood him as one understands oneself; a critic on less intimate terms with him might have insisted that he should be more generally intelligible.

... some of his latest compositions are like crystal springs in which the unclouded sun lies mirrored. But how rare and brief are these ecstasies of his quiet contemplation! The lark's song in the sky and the calm gliding of the swan over motionless waters are, for him, lightning flashes of loveliness in serenity. The plaintive cry of the famished eagle from the Majorcan crags, the harsh whistle of the north-easter, and the dreary desolation of the snow-clad peaks affected him longer and more deeply than the sweet perfume of the orange-trees, the gracefulness of the vines, or the quaint Moorish cantilena of the labourer's songs ...