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Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“
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 Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
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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.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
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One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. Experiences and aspirations of which intimations may be found in Plato, Nietzsche, and Spinoza have found their most evocative expression in some sacred books. Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.
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Walter Kaufmann
“
Respirația mi se pare schimbul cel mai important pe care-l facem cu Lumea. Cum adică? Trag aer în piept. Aer care e plin de respirațiile tuturor animalelor, tuturor plantelor. De respirațiile părinților, bunicilor, străinilor, cunoscuților... Îl trag în piept. Mă hrănesc cu el și îl eliberez din nou în Lume. Cu mine inclusă în el. Hm... și imediat sunt respirată de toată omenirea. De tot Universul. Și mai sunt oameni care se simt singuri... Trag aer. În plămânii mei ajunge aer consumat de Shakespeare, de Mozart, de Isus... dar și aer folosit de criminalii omenirii...
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Oana Pellea (Jurnal 2003 - 2009)
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Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.” ― Plato
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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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.
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Alexander McCall Smith (La's Orchestra Saves the World)
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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.
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Josie Ferguson (The Silence In Between)
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We are what we repeatedly do. Greatness then, is not an act, but a habit” ― Aristotle “...happiness
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.” ― Plato “According
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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You couldn't lose, you was playing Mozart
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Bryce Courtenay (The Power of One (The Power of One, #1))
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Music-good music, great music-is itself magical, it's 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 in adequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.
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Dean Koontz (The City (The City, #1))
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I once was the guest of the week on a British radio show called Desert Island Discs. You have to choose the eight records you would take with you if marooned on a desert island. Among my choices was Mache dich mein Herze rein from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The interviewer was unable to understand how I could choose religious music without being religious. You might as well say, how can you enjoy Wuthering Heights when you know perfectly well that Cathy and Heathcliff never really existed? But there is an additional point that I might have made, and which needs to be made whenever religion is given credit for, say, the Sistine Chapel or Raphael’s Annunciation. Even great artists have to earn a living, and they will take commissions where they are to be had. I have no reason to doubt that Raphael and Michelangelo were Christians—it was pretty much the only option in their time—but the fact is almost incidental. Its enormous wealth had made the Church the dominant patron of the arts. If history had worked out differently, and Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science, mightn’t he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear Beethoven’s Mesozoic Symphony, or Mozart’s opera The Expanding Universe. And what a shame that we are deprived of Haydn’s Evolution Oratorio—but that does not stop us from enjoying his Creation.
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Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
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All I insist on, and nothing else, is that you should show the whole world that you are not afraid. Be silent, if you choose; but when it is necessary, speak—and speak in such a way that people will remember It.” ― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart “As
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.” ― Aristotle “Excellence
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working around me like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamertine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practise four to five hours a day of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don't go mad you will find me an artist!
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Franz Liszt
“
It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own mumuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined. .
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Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Mozart's Starling)
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I personally love the Bible. I read it all the time, in the original Greek and Hebrew; I study it; I teach it. I have done so for over thirty-five years. And I don’t plan to stop any time soon. But I don’t think the Bible is perfect. Far from it. The Bible is filled with a multitude of voices, and these voices are often at odds with one another, contradicting one another in minute details and in major issues involving such basic views as what God is like, who the people of God are, who Jesus is, how one can be in a right relationship with God, why there is suffering in the world, how we are to behave, and on and on. And I heartily disagree with the views of most of the biblical authors on one point or another. Still, in my judgment all of these voices are valuable and they should all be listened to. Some of the writers of the Bible were religious geniuses, and just as we listen to other geniuses of our tradition—Mozart and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Dickens—so we ought to listen to the authors of the Bible. But they were not inspired by God, in my opinion, any more than any other genius is. And they contradict each other all over the map.
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Bart D. Ehrman (Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth)
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Even without abstract thought or metaphysical theorizing, just standing on two legs and using clubs gave mankind more than enough skill to win the race for survival on earth. These other abilities aren’t that necessary. And in exchange for our hyper-capable cerebral cortexes, of necessity we have to give up lots of other physical abilities. For example, dogs have a sense of smell several thousand times better than humans, and a sense of hearing tens of times better. But we’re able to amass complex hypotheses. We’re able to compare and contrast the cosmos and the microcosmos, and appreciate Van Gogh and Mozart. We can read Proust—if you want to, that is—and collect Koimari porcelain and Persian rugs. Not something a dog can do.
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Haruki Murakami (Killing Commendatore)
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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.
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Søren Kierkegaard
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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.
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Søren Kierkegaard
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In 1829 Rossini was at an age which has often proven critical in the lives of musicians, painters and writers. Lapses into silence far more complete than Rossini's, creative failures, suicides, and unanticipated deaths have been common in the middle to late 30s. As Charles Rosen has noted, 'It is the age when the most fluent composer begins to lose the ease of inspiration he once possessed, when even Mozart had to make sketches and to revise'.
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Richard Osborne (Rossini (Master Musicians Series))
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I'm not going to tell Mozart what piano to play on, I'm just going to tell him I want to hear something beautiful
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Bradley Bowman
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Most modern logicians would classify 15, "God has spoken to me" as equally meaningless in the above sense. Partially, I agree. Partially, I think it more accurate, and compassionate, to regard this as a badly-formulated self-referential statement. That is, just as "Beethoven is better than Mozart" is a bad formulation of the self-referential proposition 'Beethoven seems better than Mozart to me,"it may be most helpful to consider "God has spoken to me" as a bad formulation of the correct proposition, "I have had such an awe-inspiring experience that the best model I know to describe it is to say that God spoke to me." I think this is helpful because the proposition is only false if the person is deliberately lying, and because it reminds us that similar experiences are often stated within other paradigms, such as "I became one with the Buddha-mind" or "I became one with the Universe." These have different philosophical meanings than "God has spoken to me," but probably refer to the same kind of etic (non-verbal) experiences.
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Robert Anton Wilson (The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science)
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There is a term for those who triumph against the odds—for winners nobody saw coming. They are called dark horses.
The expression 'dark horse' first entered common parlance after the publication of The Young Duke in 1831. In this British novel, the title character bets on a horse race and loses big after the race is won by an unknown “dark horse, which had never been thought of.” The phrase quickly caught on. “Dark horse” came to denote an unexpected victor who had been overlooked because she did not fit the standard notion of a champion.
Ever since the term was coined, society has enjoyed a peculiar relationship with dark horses. By definition, we ignore them until they attain their success, at which point we are entertained and inspired by tales of their unconventional ascent. Even so, we rarely feel there is much to learn from them that we might profitably apply to our own lives, since their achievements often seem to rely upon haphazard spurts of luck.
We applaud the tenacity and pluck of a dark horse like Jennie or Alan, but the very improbability of their transformation—from fast-food server to planet-hunting astronomer, from blue-collar barkeep to upscale couturier— makes their journeys seem too exceptional to emulate. Instead, when we seek a dependable formula for success, we turn to the Mozarts, Warren Buffetts, and Tiger Woodses of the world. The ones everybody saw coming.
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Todd Rose (Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment)
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Where on earth did it come from? You can ask that question of any poem, and one inevitable answer is a simple one: work. No made thing springs up unbidden, even those that seem to. The poem that announced itself to the intoxicated Coleridge, before a knock at the door banished most of it from his memory, or the composition that sprung full blown into the head of Mozart, as he stepped down from a carriage after a satisfying dinner, seemed to pour from the artist's hand, so long schooled those hands had become. But years of labor inform those spontaneous productions. Though a poem over which one struggles may seem labored, it often prepares the way for new writing in which what's been learned emerges with an effortless grace.
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Mark Doty (What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life)
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All the solitary hours a writer pours into a novel would avail little if not for the solitary hours poured into it by many unseen others. Anyway I assume those others also do their work in solitude; maybe they work in pairs or crews or tag teams, but I’d rather imagine them slaving over my words in a poorly lit and otherwise unoccupied room, just as I do. Maybe they will have a little music for company, but nothing too upbeat, something along the lines of Mozart’s Requiem, for example, because as everybody who has ever worked on a book knows, this work can be as grueling in its way as crawling on your knees through ten acres of ground-hugging plants to pick potato beetles off one at a time and flick them into a galvanized bucket filled with soapy water. But it can also be as transcendent as the Requiem—or as picking potato beetles when you are in the right frame of mind for it.
Knowing other people are engaged in the same underappreciated labor and squeezing a perverse kind of joy out of it is what keeps me writing, especially if it’s my field of potatoes they are picking over. Sometimes I like to picture each of my collaborators working their way down a row, their backs aching, hands filthy with beetle juice, fingernails broken, eyes going cross-eyed in the faltering light. It’s inspirational.
Thirty years ago, I would have written (and did) a dull-as-dirt acknowledgment to thank each of my collaborators. It would have had all the excitement of a divorce decree. Back then I had no idea how difficult and precarious a job it is to turn out a novel every couple of years. It gets more difficult and precarious every year. So does living. To me, they’re pretty much the same thing.
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Randall Silvis (Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery, #1))
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It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own murmuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined..
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Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Mozart's Starling)
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The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.” ― Charles Darwin “I
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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Whilst Man, however well-behaved, At best is but a monkey shaved!” ― Charles Darwin “Discharge
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.” ― Plato
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being” ― Plato
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” ― Aristotle “A
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” ― Aristotle “I
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.” ― Aristotle “Learning
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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Character is simply habit long continued.” ― Plato
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)
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He turned to music—Mozart in particular—when he was grappling with complex problems and needed inspiration.8 He is quoted as saying, “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration. . . . Imagination is more important than knowledge.
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Emma Seppälä (The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success)
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Upon the couple’s return to Vienna, Mozart met Joseph Haydn for the first time in early 1784. The two formed a close friendship and frequently collaborated, utilizing friendly competition to fuel the composition of numerous works from both composers. When Haydn would visit Vienna, it was routine that he and Mozart would play together in a hastily assembled string quartet. Mozart wrote six quartets that were specifically dedicated to Haydn, and many scholars group them as a set of compositions created in response to Haydn’s Opus 33 set, providing further evidence that both composers drew inspiration from each other.
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Hourly History (Mozart: A Life From Beginning to End (Composer Biographies))
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Thoughts provide important information, but they are not fundamentally different from or more important than, say, the taste of a pear or hearing a Mozart symphony.
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Benjamin W. Decker (Practical Meditation for Beginners: 10 Days to a Happier, Calmer You)
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What is decisive is that, in his personal goals and wishes, in his sense of what had meaning and what did not, he anticipated the attitudes and feelings of a later type of artist. [...] In other words, Mozart represented the free artists who places his trust largely in individual inspiration.
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Norbert Elias (Mozart: Portrait of a Genius)
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A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” ― Charles Darwin “Thus,
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Daniel Hemsworth (Inspirational Quotes from the Greatest Minds in Human History (Part 2): Plato, Galileo Galilei, Aristotle, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Darwin)