You will not find a treatise that is too learned for me; without laying claim to any genuine learning, I yet accustomed myself from childhood onwards… - Ludwig van Beethoven

"The only sign of "superiority" I acknowledge in Man is goodness."

O you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me, you do not know the secret causes of my seeming. I sometimes ran counter to it yielding to my inclination for society, but what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence.

Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.