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

“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

“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

“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

“People 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.

“if you live simply and with a lyrical heart
in the cumbered neighborhoods or even,
as Mozart sometimes managed to, in a palace,

offering tune after tune after tune,
making some hard-hearted prince
prudent and kind, just by being happy”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst

“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.

“The Enemy Within by Stewart Stafford

There is more to a smile than the baring of teeth,
His grin had all the warmth of daggers unsheathed,
The lips did part but the eyes remained staring,
The skin was pocked and trust was badly faring.

The lips quivered at every imagined slight,
The eyes glittered like a serpent's at twilight,
Arms crossed in constant defence,
The foot tapping, waiting to take offence.

Who knows or cares of his jealousy's genesis,
He strove beyond measure to become my nemesis,
Seeking to frustrate me at every turn,
And put me prematurely in a cremation urn.

The hero can fend off any attack,
Except for the knife that's plunged in the back,
They may not even know the weapon's in far,
Until the assailant's coup de grâce.

© Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“In contemporary culture, we are concerned that everything we do be useful for something. [...] we find ourselves in the land of half-baked pseudoscience like the “Mozart makes you smart” fad. The fact that Mozart’s fantastic play has value in itself is not sufficient because in order to justify financial and other kinds of support for the arts, we have to demonstrate that Mozart will raise a fetus’s IQ, which will make the fetus grow into a productive unit in the economy.”
― Stephen Nachmanovitch

“Despite being one of the greatest musical geniuses, he disdained high-brow musical jargon. Instead music was a living thing, something to be pranced about the room, or taken for a little stroll.”
― Donovan Bixley, Faithfully Mozart. The fantastical world of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“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

“With his Don Juan Mozart enters the little immortal circle of those whose names, whose works, time will not forget, because eternity remembers them. And though it is a matter of indifference, when one has found entrance there, whether one stands highest or lowest, because in a certain sense all stand equally high, since all stand infinitely high, and though it is childish to dispute over the first and the last place here, as it is when children quarrel about the order assigned to them in the church at confirmation, I am still too much of a child, or rather I am like a young girl in love with Mozart, and I must have him in first place, cost what it may. And I will appeal to the parish clerk and to the priest and to the dean and to the bishop and to the whole consistory, and I will implore and adjure them to hear my prayer, and I will invoke the whole congregation on this matter, and if they refuse to hear me, if they refuse to grant my childish wish, I excommunicate myself, and renounce all fellowship with their modes of thought; and I will form a sect which not only gives Mozart first place, but which absolutely refuses to recognize any artist other than Mozart; and I shall beg Mozart to forgive me, because his music did not inspire me to great deeds, but turned me into a fool, who lost through him the little reason I had, and spent most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a specter day and night what I am not permitted to enter. Immortal Mozart! Thou, to whom I owe everything; to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that caused my soul to tremble, the fear that gripped my inmost being; thou, to whom I owe it that I did not pass through life without having been stirred by something. Thou, to whom I offer thanks that I did not die without having loved, even though my love became unhappy. Is it strange then that I should be more concerned for Mozart's glorification than for the happiest moment of my life, more jealous for his immortality than for my own existence? Aye, if he were taken away, if his name were erased from the memory of men, then would the last pillar be overthrown, which for me has kept everything from being hurled together into boundless chaos, into fearful nothningness.”
― Kierkegaard

“With his Don Juan Mozart enters the little immortal circle of those whose names, whose works, time will not forget, because eternity remembers them. And though it is a matter of indifference, when one has found entrance there, whether one stands highest or lowest, because in a certain sense all stand equally high, since all stand infinitely high, and though it is childish to dispute over the first and the last place here, as it is when children quarrel about the order assigned to them in the church at confirmation, I am still too much of a child, or rather I am like a young girl in love with Mozart, and I must have him in first place, cost what it may. And I will appeal to the parish clerk and to the priest and to the dean and to the bishop and to the whole consistory, and I will implore and adjure them to hear my prayer, and I will invoke the whole congregation on this matter, and if they refuse to hear me, if they refuse to grant my childish wish, I excommunicate myself, and renounce all fellowship with their modes of thought; and I will form a sect which not only gives Mozart first place, but which absolutely refuses to recognize any artist other than Mozart; and I shall beg Mozart to forgive me, because his music did not inspire me to great deeds, but turned me into a fool, who lost through him the little reason I had, and spent most of my time in quiet sadness humming what I do not understand, haunting like a specter day and night what I am not permitted to enter. Immortal Mozart! Thou, to whom I owe everything; to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that caused my soul to tremble, the fear that gripped my inmost being; thou, to whom I owe it that I did not pass through life without having been stirred by something. Thou, to whom I offer thanks that I did not die without having loved, even though my love became unhappy. Is it strange then that I should be more concerned for Mozart's glorification than for the happiest moment of my life, more jealous for his immortality than for my own existence? Aye, if he were taken away, if his name were erased from the memory of men, then would the last pillar be overthrown, which for me has kept everything from being hurled together into boundless chaos, into fearful nothingness.”
― Kierkegaard

“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