A Quote by Charles Gounod

Before Mozart, all ambition turns to despair.

Charles Gounod

Quote Topics

Ambition Before Despair Mozart Turns

Quote Author

Charles Gounod
French - Composer
June 17, 1818 - October 18, 1893

We cannot despair about mankind knowing that Mozart was a man.

Albert Einstein

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment; the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.

Walter Savage Landor

Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself. Thus sin is intensified weakness or intensified defiance: sin is the intensification of despair. The emphasis is on before God, or with a conception of God; it is the conception of God that makes sin dialectically, ethically, and religiously what lawyers call 'aggravated' despair.

Soren Kierkegaard

When I started, my teachers told me that I had to sing Mozart, Mozart, Mozart. I said, No, I want to sing all the other stuff. If you do not push yourself, you will stay the same. Maybe some singers are happy with that, but I have to move, I have to do something new always.

Anna Netrebko

When I started, my teachers told me that I had to sing 'Mozart, Mozart, Mozart.' I said, 'No, I want to sing all the other stuff.' If you do not push yourself, you will stay the same. Maybe some singers are happy with that, but I have to move, I have to do something new always.

Anna Netrebko

I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But, Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.

Isaac Asimov

The philosophy I shared... was one of ambition - ambition to succeed, ambition to grow, ambition to move forward - backed up by hard work.

Frank Lowy

But 'tis common proof, that lowliness is young ambition's ladder, whereto the climber-upward turns his face; but when he once attains the upmost round, he then turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the vase defrees by which he did ascend.

William Shakespeare

Nobody sits alone accompanied only by a stewing ambition that won't see fruit for years. Ambition is something you turn into publicity before there's anything to publicize.

Cris Mazza

Compared with the person who is conscious of his despair, the despairing individual who is ignorant of his despair is simply a negativity further away from the truth and deliverance. . . . Yet ignorance is so far from breaking the despair or changing despair to nondespairing that it can in fact be the most dangerous form of despair. . . . An individual is furthest from being conscious of himself as spirit when he is ignorant of being in despair. But precisely this-not to be conscious of oneself as spirit-is despair, which is spiritlessness. . . .

Soren Kierkegaard

When I hear music I want to engage in it. Even if I engage in it very quickly and turn it off in my mind. If I'm in an elevator, clearly I don't want to be dealing with that, even if it's Mozart. In fact, especially if it's Mozart. I don't think Mozart belongs in an elevator.

Thomas Hampson

...and while ambition sleeps inside of me I content myself with memories of glitter and despair.

Mark Twight

An individual in despair despairs over something. . . . In despairing over something, he really despair[s] over himself, and now he wants to get rid of himself. Consequently, to despair over something is still not despair proper. . . . To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair.

Soren Kierkegaard

The revolutionary Mozart is the Mozart of his last eight years.