Top 100 Mozart's Quotes
#1. Mozart's music is particularly difficult to perform. His admirable clarity exacts absolute cleanness: the slightest mistake in it stands out like black on white. It is music in which all the notes must be heard.
Gabriel Faure
#2. I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we listen to Mozart's 'Requiem.'
Andre Dubus III
#3. All my life I have regarded myself as one of Mozart's greatest admirers, and I will remain one until my last breath.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#4. Mozart's joy is made of serenity, and a phrase of his music is like a calm thought; his simplicity is merely purity. It is a crystalline thing in which all the emotions play a role, but as if already celestially transposed. Moderation consists in feeling emotions as the angels do.
Andre Gide
#5. Mozart's music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.
Karl Barth
#6. Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.
Allan Bloom
#7. Mozart's music was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.
Albert Einstein
#8. Mozart's mental grip never loosens; he never abandons himself to any one sense; even at his most ecstatic moments his mind is vigorous, alert, and on the wing. He dives unerringly on to his finest ideas like a bird of prey, and once an idea is seized he soars off again with an undiminished power.
Walter J. Turner
#9. Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.
Leonard Bernstein
#10. I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart's Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.
Gene Weingarten
#11. My first singing role was as Susanna in a school production in a shortened form of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. I loved to sing and I was given lots of encouragement by a wonderful music teacher Mrs Ann Hill and by my parents who suggested I go to drama school.
Elaine Paige
#12. Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?
Douglas Adams
#13. Contrary to popular definitions, true tolerance means 'putting up with error' - not 'accepting all views'. We don't tolerate what we enjoy or endorse - say, chocolate, or roses, or Mozart's music. By definition, we tolerate what we don't approve of or what we believe to be false.
Paul Copan
#15. Mozart's music is like an X-ray of your soul - it shows what is there, and what isn't.
Isaac Stern
#16. Mozart's music is the mysterious language of a distant spiritual kingdom, whose marvelous accents echo in our inner being and arouse a higher, intensive life.
E.T.A. Hoffmann
#17. Blumenthal goes straight to the heart in these poems. Gorgeously wrought, surprising, true, wise, elegiac, they leave me with a sense of having listened to Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus. Who could ask for more?
Lynn Freed
#18. When you first hear Mozart's music, your first impression is that it's very alive, but if you peel away the layers, you can hear sorrow and sadness behind it, and that's what I try to be: multi-layered.
Park Chan-wook
#19. Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
Joyce Carol Oates
#20. Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.
Aldous Huxley
#21. Some of Mozart's Andantes emanate an ethereal desolation, a sort of dream funeral in another life.
Emil Cioran
#22. Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.
Miguel Nicolelis
#23. My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.
Simon McBurney
#24. Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
#25. Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#26. Mozart's music is free of all exaggeration, of all sharp breaks and contradictions. The sun shines but does not blind, does not burn or consume. Heaven arches over the earth, but it does not weigh it down, it does not crush or devour it.
Karl Barth
#27. I listened to the pure crystalline notes of one of Mozart's concertos dropping at my feet like leaves from the trees.
Virgil Thomson
#28. Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.
Karl Barth
#29. Mozart's seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That's what I've found working on 'The Magic Flute.'
Simon McBurney
#30. To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.
Lukas Foss
#31. The fact that most people do not understand and respect the very best things, such as Mozart's concertos, is what permits men like us to become famous.
Johannes Brahms
#32. Does it not seem as if Mozart's works become fresher and fresher the oftener we hear them?
Robert Schumann
#33. Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard Bernstein
#34. Jacques wants a pancake shaped like Mozart's Symphony No. 40! In G minor!
Michelle Cuevas
#35. Mozart's music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.
Albert Einstein
#36. The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.
Peter Shaffer
#37. Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.
Lukas Foss
#38. I'm trying to learn classical piano, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. I took lessons when I was younger and now I sort of sight read the music and play it by ear. It's fun. It takes up a lot of time. I practice a couple of hours a day, but I find it soothing.
Evan Peters
#40. Mozart, who was buried in a pauper's grave, was one of the greatest successes we know of, a man who in his early thirties had poured out his inexhaustible gift of music, leaving the world richer because he had passed that way. To leave the world richer - that is the ultimate success.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#41. Mozart began his works in childhood and a childlike quality lurked in his compositions until it dawned on him that the Requiem he was writing for s a stranger was his own.
Ariel Durant
#42. If you think you're going to have an eternity in which you can talk to Mozart and Chopin and Schopenhauer on a cloud and learn stuff and you know really get to grips with knowledge and understanding and so you won't bother now, I think it's a terrible, a terrible mistake.
Stephen Fry
#43. When you play Mozart, it's so clean, it's so simple. It's the body naked.
Gustavo Dudamel
#44. Mozart," Julie says in a bitter chuckle, staring at the speaker. "It's supposed to be the pinnacle of art, right? This transcendent human achievement? And we use it for background noise in bathrooms. We literally shit on it.
Isaac Marion
#45. Even when I can play Europe's most precious keyboard, to have to listen to people who don't understand, or do not want to understand, and who are incapable of grasping my intent, whatever I play, does surely forfeit my lust for playing at all.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
#46. You need some reason why Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn in the 18th century all flocked to Vienna. What was it about Vienna? They must have known on some level that that is where they would flourish. It's what biologists call "selective migration."
Eric Weiner
#47. Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.
Edward Abbey
#48. It's like telling Mozart that there are too many notes in an opera. Which one do you want us to take out?
Gordon Bethune
#49. I can't cut off an ear everyday. Do the Van Gogh here and the Mozart there. Anyway it's exhausting enough always having to check up on what one is really doing!.
Martin Kippenberger
#50. The extraordinary thing about Irving Berlin is that he's like the American Mozart! It seems as if his songs were always there. How do you put together songs like 'Always' or 'Cheek To Cheek'? Songs of his are, frankly, perfect.
Maury Yeston
#51. My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go "a one and a two and up." We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them.
James Brown
#52. Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.
Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?
Peter Shaffer
#53. I am not one to compare long melodies as did Mozart. I can't get beyond short themes. But what I can do, is to utilize such a theme, paraphrase it and extract everything that is in it, and I don't think there's anybody today who can match me at that.
Stefan Zweig
#54. The only thing that interests me in music is to be able to reach into the, let's call it, 'collective unconscious' of what is noblest in the human spirit, the way you find in the music of Mozart and Beethoven and Verdi that wonderful quality that not a note can be changed.
Gian Carlo Menotti
#55. When we hear some beautiful piece of Mozart or admire a wonderful building, we suddenly become present in ourselves. That's unusual nowadays because dishevelment and distraction have become an art form.
John O'Donohue
#56. It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him ... he never bores me, and he doesn't ... not only bore me, that's too strong a word.
Peter Shaffer
#57. Lombardi: There's a whole series of beautiful Mozart and Wagner records, in still very pristine condition. But, never a Bible. Until now. May I ask what condition it's in?
Eli: It's beat up. But it will do the job.
Book Of Eli Movie
#58. People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.
Anthony Hopkins
#59. Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.
Rebecca West
#60. Someone like Mozart moves from Salzburg to Vienna, where all of the sudden he finds this musical city that is not only asking for music, it's demanding music of him.
Eric Weiner
#61. I listen to tons of hard rock and metal, like Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc., but I also listen to Beethoven and Mozart, to Discharge and the Bad Brains, and to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. So I think there's merit to both the melodic punk and to the hardcore stuff too.
Dave Smalley
#62. I think the music of Mozart is like a universe of human feelings, sentiments and fragility, and ... that's why it's so 'actual' in a way, so modern.
Cecilia Bartoli
#63. I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
#64. I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.
Colm Toibin
#65. I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles.
Tod Machover
#66. Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.
Rose Macaulay
#67. Did you know that Mozart had no arms and no legs? I've seen statues of him on people's pianos.
Victor Borge
#68. Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy - and it made me feel something. That's when I realized music was inside me.
Alicia Keys
#69. Louis Armstrong on Mondays, Frank Sinatra on Wednesdays, Glenn Miller on Fridays, and Mozart on Sundays. Unless it was raining. If it's raining, it's always Billie Holiday.
Clare Vanderpool
#70. I'm not trying to overcome my father or fill his shoes or reach any kind of level that he did. We're talking about a Mozart of rock music.
Sean Lennon
#71. 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
#72. Absurdly, irrationally, she believed that music could make a difference to the temper of the world.She did not investigate this belief, test it to see whether it made sense;she simply believed it, and so she chose music that expressed order and healing:Bach for order, Mozart for healing.
Alexander McCall Smith
#73. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relationships with this best and truest friend of mankind that death's image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
#74. Mozart is waiting for me. Pablo is waiting for me.
Hermann Hesse
#75. Mozart starved, but you allow Thalberg and Liszt make tons of gold: Of course, you may think that someone immortal cannot die of hunger
Franz Grillparzer
#76. If you go to Japan for instance, you should know that they have a different way of playing Beethoven or Brahms. But if you play with them Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, they have a wonderful light feeling for that.
Kurt Masur
#77. I was lucky Mozart was not eligible this year.
Maurice Jarre
#78. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.
Gioachino Rossini
#79. Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.
Aaron Copland
#80. If people could see into my heart, I should almost feel ashamed - all there is cold, cold as ice.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
#81. And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.
Tony Randall
#82. His left foot is fantastic. It's like Mozart. God gave Freddy the gift to play soccer. If he is prepared mentally and physically, nobody will stop him.
(on Freddy Adu)
Pele
#83. Plenty of people detested Michael Jackson before his death wiped away the world's collective memory. Timberlake was originally dismissed as just another boy-bander. Legions have joined in a 'Hate Anne Hathaway' movement. Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Kristen Bell, even Mozart had haters.
Kurt Eichenwald
#84. A. R. Rahman is truly India's Mozart. His music is celebrated worldwide.
Kailash Kher
#85. You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life.
Maurice Sendak
#86. Am reading the life of Mozart and cannot help thinking that one's capacity for suffering is in direct proportion to one's greatness.
Lily Koppel
#88. The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight.
Stendhal
#89. My mum is in a mental hospital. There's a fine line between genius and insanity. Winston Churchill, Mozart, John Lennon. These people all had a touch of crazy that fuelled their brilliance. They were not locked up for it like my mum. Pft. Then again, Winston Churchill never tried to kill my dad.
Christopher Titus
#90. Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.
Douglas Adams
#91. When Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain ... I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.
Maurice Sendak
#93. If Mozart had power tools, there's no telling how great his music might have been.
Dave Barry
#94. Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose. That's the missing element in the popular portrait of Mozart.
Twyla Tharp
#95. It's your choice, what you do with the moment. If you're stuck in a traffic jam, you can get angry and honk your horn, or listen to Mozart. But when you have a very specific expectation of how things should be, then, of course, you end up hurting yourself.
Deepak Chopra
#96. The most perfect melodic shapes are found in Mozart; he has the lightness of touch which is the true objective ... Listen to the remarkable expansion of a Mozart melody, to Cherubino's 'Voi che sapete', for instance. You think it is coming to an end, but it goes farther, even farther.
Richard Strauss
#97. No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.
John Ruskin
#98. Imagine if you could go watch Mozart today, even if it's the last, crappiest show he ever played. What a thrill that would be.
Roger Daltrey
#99. The Maestro says it's Mozart but it sounds like bubble gum when you're waiting for the miracle to come.
Leonard Cohen
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