"I always dreamed in my youth of a great, consuming love. I was often disappointed and returned each time to my music for consolation. It never failed me."

"In earlier days I used to like introducing new music in concerts but now I feel that I have done my duty to young composers… so I return to my first love Romantic music – and especially to Brahms who has always been my favourite."

"Told, during the days of segregation in the US, that he couldn't be served as he was trying to take breakfast at a restaurant "for colored folk", he insisted: "But we are colored, my dear. We are pink.""

"I regret they don't have symphony orchestras all over the world so I could see Burma and Samarkand."

"Debussy was behind me when we played L'après-midi d'un faune because he did not want anything in his score to be changed on account of the dancing. And when we came to a forte, he said 'Monteux, that is a forte, play forte'. He did not want anything shimmering. And he wanted everything exactly in time."

"Madame, everyone is Someone."

"On finishing early at a rehearsal the London Symphony Orchestra leader Hugh Maguire said to Monteux: "Oh Maitre it is so nice to finish early. My wife will be so surprised." Monteux replied: "Be careful. You might be surprised!""

"Cette grande gloire de la France (Great glory of France)"

"La cause de notre grandeur Peut l'être aussi de notre parte."

"Secret de Polichinelle."

"Amis, plus souvent qu’on ne croit, La tache est tout juste à l'endroit Où l'on voit briller la paillette."

"Je vais où va toute chose, Où va la feuille de rose Et lafeuille de laurier."

"J'aime mieux un franc ennemi Qu'un bon ami qui m'égratigne."

"The incentives that people need to work and to find meaning in their lives should be found beyond material wealth and power."

"The problem is not that this optimistic view is wrong. By economic accounting, the optimistic view is mostly right."

"Finally, empirical data suggests that assets are sold much more slowly during retirement years than when they are accumulated during working years."

"Faster-than-exponential growth also occurs in computing power, as measured by the evolution of the number of MIPS per $1,000 of computer from 1900 to 1997. Thus the so-called Moore's law is incorrect, since it implies only an exponential growth. This faster than exponential acceleration has been argued to lead to a transition to a new era, around 2030, corresponding to the epoch when we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence."

"The acceleration of the number of traders buying into the market in the inflating bubble captures the oft-quoted observation that bubbles are times when the "greater fool theory" applies."

"The same basic ingredients are found repeatably: fueled by initially well founded economic fundamentals, investors develop a self-fulfilling enthusiasm by an imitative process or crowd behavior that leads to an unsustainable accelerating overvaluation."

"By one estimate, 90% of international transactions were accounted for by trade before 1970, and only 10% by capital flows. Today, despite a vast increase in global trade, that ratio has been reversed, with 90% of transactions accounted for by financial flows not directly related to trade in goods and services."

"The price of a stock is strongly influenced by the behavior of the traders in a nontrivial way."

"The assumption of perfectly rational, maximizing behavior won out until recently in the art of modeling, not because it often reflects reality, but because it was useful."

"A bubble that goes up is just one that could have crashed but did not."

"Indeed, the frequency of crashes in the Monte Carlo simulations was much smaller than the frequency of crashes in the real data: if one of the most frequently used benchmarks of the industry is incapable of reproducing the observed frequency of crashes, this indeed means that there is something to explain that may require new concepts and methods."

"One trader's move in the market can be interpreted by another trader as relevant additional information due to the uncertainty he faces."

"Profiting from being in the minority leads to interesting paradoxes. Rather diabolically, if all traders use the same set of rules, they will end up doing the same thing at the same time and cannot therefore be in the minority."

"Knowledge is encoded in models. Models are synthetic sets of rules, and pictures, and algorithms providing us with useful representations of the world of our perceptions and of their patterns."

"Indeed, the financial world is such that any insight is almost immediately used to trade for a profit."

"It is difficult to assess how much this gambling spirit is active in the minds of individual investors. If it is, even to a small degree, it is relevant to our discussion since it makes investors prone to imitation and herding because they invest on little information. It may also explain the anomalously large volatility of prices and their potential instabilities."

"In order to have a continuing influence, the stock market has to continue rising at an accelerating pace faster than exponential. Only a faster-than-exponential stock market growth makes private investors feel richer."

"These rumors do not circulate in all directions, but essentially from the top to the bottom of society. The rather sophisticated presentations, the apparently serious references that seem to justify their origins, and their distinguished proponents provide food for amplifications serving diverse interests and psychological biases in all layers of society."

"Perhaps the most profound synthesis of physical sciences came from the realization that everything could be understood from "conservation laws" and symmetry principals."

"According to the academic world view that markets are efficient, only the revelation of a dramatic piece of information can cause a crash, yet in reality even the most thorough post-mortem analyses are typically inconclusive as to what this piece of information might have been. For traders and investors, the fear of a crash is a perpetual source of stress, and the onset of the event itself always ruins the lives of some of them."

"The concept of a random walk is simple but rich for its many applications, not only in finance but also in physics and the description of natural phenomena. It is arguably one of the most founding concepts in modern physics as well as in finance, as it underlies the theories of elementary particles, which are the building blocks of our universe, as well as those describing the complex organization of matter around us."

"Since it is the actions of investors whose buy and sell decisions move prices up and down, any deviation from a random walk has ultimately to be traced back to the behavior of investors."

"At another level, market crashes constitute beautiful examples of events that we would all like to forecast. The arrow of time is inexorably projecting us toward the undetermined future. Predicting the future captures the imagination of all and is perhaps the greatest challenge."

"Positive feedbacks, when unchecked, can produce runaways until the deviation from equilibrium is so large that other effects can be abruptly triggered and lead to ruptures and crashes."

"The point is that humans are rarely at their best when they use rational reasoning."

"The old Wall Street saying " buy on rumors, sell on the news," is alive and well, as can be seen from numerous sources in the media and the Internet. Rumors can drive herding behavior strongly."

"The phenomena and underlying mechanisms discussed in this book may thus become even more relevant to a larger and larger portion of human activity. Understand their origin, and be prepared for subtle but significant precursors!"

"Power is no linger seen as inheriting its legitimacy from some divine authority; it is a mere convention which we adhere to because we are born and educated into it, and because we see others conform to it. Its strength lies in the fact that we believe that others believe in it: power is no more than the illusion of power. The exercise of power is a constant fight to keep up appearances."

"Well, it has been a long time since manna last fallen from heaven. We cannot live alone; we rely on others to produce the stuff of our material and intellectual life, and we have to organize society so that its members will cooperate toward the common good."

"What is needed is courage: it is always so much easier to accept what you are being told than to think for yourself."

"In the struggle for life, or in the struggle for power, there is no reason why their victory would make the world better than it was. There is no invisible hand guiding these processes, dealing out victory to the most deserving. Chance is their leader."

"The measurement of time was the first example of a scientific discovery changing the technology."

"The moment when the scientists became engineers was a historical turning point."

"An equilibrium is not always an optimum; it might not even be good. This may be the most important discovery of game theory."

"Chaos cuts with two edges. We have seen how it is impossible to retrieve past history from current observations. We will now show that it is impossible to predict future states from the current observations."

"Many great failures and many great successes are due to chance and not to human folly or ingenuity."