Mozart Quotes

“I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“Grover wore his fake feet and his pants to pass as human. He wore a green rasta-style cap, because when it rained his curly hair flattened and you could just see the tips of his horns. His bright orange backpack was full of scrap metal and apples to snack on. In his pocket was a set of reed pipes his daddy goat had carved for him, even though he only knew two songs: Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 12 and Hilary Duff's "So Yesterday," both of which sounded pretty bad on reed pipes.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”
― Susan Sontag

“I am going to tell you a story you already know. But listen carefully, because within it is one you have never heard before.”
― Marie Lu, The Kingdom of Back

“One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality

“The twins spend their second day in Paris at the Louvre.

''... Really great geniuses, eh Fritz? One could barely call them human beings.''

'' As a matter of fact, I don't think they were... just superior beings from some other planet... perhaps from the same one that gave us Mozart and Plato, for it's impossible that a mere human being create such monumental works.''

''Wonderful...”
― Anton Sammut, Memories of Recurrent Echoes

“I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends--and I from Legends created only the ordinary!”
― Peter Shaffer, Amadeus

“The only thing--I tell you this straight from the heart--that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can't have any proper social intercourse with those people--and that music does not have a better reputation...For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!...A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not--but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes--bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

“According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Along the way [Mozart] got married; fathered seven children (two of whom survived into adulthood); performed as a pianist; violinist; and conductor; maintained a successful teaching studio; wrote thousands of letters; traveled widely; attended the theater religiously; played cards, billiards, and bocce; and rode horseback for exercise. Not bad for someone portrayed as a giggling idiot in the movies.”
― Robert Greenberg, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music

“I'd fight a gang of wolves if they attacked my ducks. Like Mozart, you can call me Wolfgang.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“Le Requiem de Mozart. Un souffle de l'au-delà y plane. Comment croire, après une pareille audition, que l'univers n'ait aucun sens? Il faut qu'il en ait un. Que tant de sublime se résolve dans le néant, le coeur, aussi bien que l'entendement, refuse de l'admettre. Quelque chose doit exister quelque part, un brin de réalité doit être contenu dans ce monde. Ivresse du possible qui rachète la vie. Craignons le retombement et le retour du savoir amer...”
― Emil Cioran, Notebooks

“When we hear a Mozart piano concerto today, we're most likely to hear the piano part played on a modern concert grand. In the hands of a professional pianist, such a piano can bury the strings and the winds and hold its own against the brass. But Mozart wasn't composing for a nine-foot-long, thousand-pound piano; he was composing for a five-and-a-half-foot-long, hundred-and-fifty-pound piano built from balsa wood and dental floss.”
― Robert Greenberg, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music

“To help my ducks improve their swimming ability, I remixed Mozart with whale sounds, and I pulse the music through their SplashTub. Snatch your tickets now, because they’re laced with catnip and going fast.”
― Jarod Kintz, BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm presents: Two Ducks Brawling Is A Pre-Pillow Fight

“I'll bet playing classical music to plants would make them grow taller. When my ducks listen to Mozart, they become more cultured and have done things like taken up golf.”
― Jarod Kintz, To be good at golf you must go full koala bear

“People always ask me, "Jarod, why haven't you won an NFL Championship by now?" My answer is the same. I reply, "I may not be Mozart, or I might be, who's to say, but if you put me in an elevator, I'm going to make music that fills the space completely, like duck quacks in a can.”
― Jarod Kintz, Duck Quotes For The Ages. Specifically ages 18-81.

“I'll be your Mozart, if you'll be my gang of wolves. If you can do that, I'll also be your Wolfgang—but you’ve got to promise to not attack my ducks.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“But in the bare practical outlines, we are two writers, sitting at our desks, with starlings on our shoulders”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“While I wandered the dreamy quiet of St. Marx Friedhof, it was the Requiem that swirled through my head. But when I set my chestnut on the gray concrete that had to stand in for Star's tiny, forgotten grave, it was the wild, swirling cadenzas from A Musical Joke that filled my mind and heart. Even more than his poem, this flight of musical fancy was Mozart's truest elegy for his small friend, the commonest of birds who could never have known that he was joining with a musical genius in the highest purpose of creative life: to disturb us out of complacency; to show us the wild, imperfect, murmuring harmony of the world we inhabit; to draw our own lives into the song.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

“How to choose an orchard plant from the nursery: Bring a stereo, play some Mozart, and whichever one dances the liveliest, that's the one you take back home to meet your ducks. You could play Beethoven, but he was deaf, so his music is a little too Helen Kelleresque for my taste.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“A zebra is the piano of the animal kingdom, and now you can learn to play like Mozart on horseback. If I can coach my ducks to become World Dodgeball Champions, I can make your musical equestrian dreams a reality.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“Piano ducks swimming make noises like drowning saxophones. I taught them how to Mozart like powdered Michael Phelps on the bottom of a crushed box of cereal.”
― Jarod Kintz, I design saxophone music in blocks, like Stonehenge

“Mozart said that music is not in the notes but in the silence in between. I think that's where our souls are – hidden in that silence.”
― Josie Ferguson, The Silence In Between

“Question : YOU HAVE DEFINED YOURSELF AS THE RICH MAN'S GURU. DON'T THE OTHER PEOPLE INTEREST YOU? ARE THE RICH PARTICULARLY IN NEED OF A GURU? OR ARE YOU THEIR GURU BECAUSE THEY HAVE MONEY?

Osho : The first thing to be understood: I have not defined myself as the rich man's guru. It is the yellow journalism, which dominates the mind of the masses around the world, which came up with the definition. I simply accepted it with my own meanings. They were saying it to be derogatory, but my meaning is totally different.

A Vincent van Gogh is far more rich than Henry Ford. Richness does not mean only wealth or money; richness is a multidimensional phenomenon. A poet may be poor, but he has a sensitivity that no money can purchase. He is richer than any rich man. A musician may not be rich, but as far as his music is concerned, no wealth is richer than his music.

To me the rich man is one who has sensitivity, creativity, receptivity. The man of wealth is only one of the dimensions. According to me the man of wealth is also a creative artist: he creates wealth.

Not everybody can be a Henry Ford. His talents should be respected, although what he creates is mundane. It cannot be compared to Mozart's music or Nijinsky's dance, or Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy. But still, he creates something which is valuable, utilitarian, and the world would be better if there were many more Henry Fords.

So when I accepted the definition, my meaning was richness in any dimension. Only a rich being can have some connection with me. A certain sensitivity is absolutely needed, a certain vision is needed.

A poor man is one whose mind is retarded - he may have immense wealth; that does not matter - who cannot understand classical music, who cannot understand poetry, who cannot understand philosophy, who cannot understand the high flights of human spirit.

There are certain basic necessities which should be fulfilled; there is a hierarchy. First your bodily needs should be fulfilled; then your psychological needs should be fulfilled. Only then for the first time you become hungry for spiritual experiences. Now what can I do about it? - that is the nature of things. If water evaporates at one hundred degrees heat, what can I do? I cannot persuade it to evaporate at ninety-nine degrees. It is the nature of things.

And this is the hierarchy: bodily needs first, then psychological needs second, and only then spiritual needs. What I can give to you concerns your hunger for spiritual growth. If it is not there, I cannot create it. If it is there, I can show you the path.

You can see it. I have not been seeking out and going to the rich people. Those who have come to me have come on their own. Their thirst has brought them to me.

I have not been giving any promises to anybody. I have not been going after anybody. Millions of people - those who have come to me - have come on their own.

And now you can see for yourself. Those who have come have a certain richness of some kind or other; it is not only the money. I have around me people of all talents, people of different kinds of genius. Somehow my very approach prevents those people who will not be benefited from coming close to me. Even if they come accidentally, they disappear; they don't stay. They don't become part of my world. They don't share the vision with me.

..by some existential arrangement I can attract only those people who are very talented, immensely intelligent, very rich in some quality of life. Only from that angle of richness will they have a connection with me.

And the yellow journalists go on saying sensational things to people, meaningless, false, ugly - because I am not a guru. If I have to define it I will say, "I am only a friend, a friend of all those who have talents, intelligence and some urge for spiritual growth." To me they are the rich people.”
― Osho, Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries

“Every single time I hear Mozart, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Beethoven-Symphony NO.5 in C Minor,
I remember those beautiful childhood memories of back home, around noon time.
Memories of my Sweet Barbados”
― Charmaine J. Forde

“Amadeus Mozart, Adolf Hitler, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were all born in Austria. Not very far from one another. How does a country produce these three men in just under two centuries time? Who will be the fourth and what may he contribute to the world? Judging by the time between each of their births, it seems we’re due for the next in line.”
― Mike Ma, Gothic Violence

“У 1787 році, вирушивши з Відня на захід до Праги, Моцарт писав, що перетнув східний кордон. Схід і Захід, Азія і Європа завжди були розділені у свідомості щонайменше так само як і земля — кордонами.”
― Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

“Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas.”
― Dana Gioia, The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays

“Music—good music, great music—is itself magical, its mysterious inspiration entwined with the mystery of all things. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so inadequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.”
― Dean Koontz, The City

“It's just one of those remarkable historical ironies that Haydn, superbly trained as a singer in the St. Stephens cathedral choir of Vienna, followed by several more years as apprentice/assistant to the renowned Italian singing teacher Porpora, ultimately became famous as a composer of instrumental music, whereas Mozart, the great piano virtuoso of his age, wrote the first important operas in the modern repertoire and is arguably most highly acclaimed as a writer for the voice.”
― David Hurwitz, Exploring Haydn: A Listener's Guide to Music's Boldest Innovator