A Quote by John Updike

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

John Updike

Quote Topics

Gives Live Mozart Music Permission Us

Quote Author

John Updike
American - Novelist
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach.

Karen DeCrow

The world needs women who stop asking for permission from the principal. Permission to live their lives as they deeply know they often should. I think we still look to authority figures for validation, recognition, permission.

Elizabeth Gilbert

God's Word does provide life lessons to teach us how to live. And it gives us beautiful poetry that gives voice to our human experience. And, yes, it does give us clear boundaries of what we should and shouldn't do so we can live our best lives.

Jennifer Rothschild

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

How we live our lives gives those we love permission to do the same. That is a power and a responsibility that we can never take lightly.

Hal Elrod

If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society-you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.

Ayn Rand

Music is my life. Music runs through my veins. Music inspires me. Music is a part of me. Music is all around us. Music soothes me. Music gives me hope when I lose faith. Music comforts me. Music is my refuge.

Demi Lovato

As a kid I didn't see black cowboys on the screen. What that said to me was that there were things I couldn't do or be because of my color. What we see others like us do gives us permission to expand our own horizons.

Walter Dean Myers

Sometimes we just need a space that gives us permission to be the best, most full version of our artistic selves, and we flourish.

Rafael Casal

Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.

J. M. Coetzee

Mozart's music always sounds unburdened, effortless, and light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.

Karl Barth

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world's great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province... Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

Aaron Copland

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

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

Jonathan Haidt

I don't think anybody can prepare on a physical level. It isn't possible to prepare for what is about to happen. The Pentagon gives us one to three years left of normal life on this planet. Now you have Al Gores movie "An Inconvenient Truth", whom I find very optimistic, as he gives us ten years. But I don't know a single scientist on the planet who gives us ten years or anybody else who gives us that long. What the Pentagon talks about is the rapid changes in climate, making it impossible to live in certain areas. Exactly where those areas are, they don't know.