My dear sister! I’m amazed to discover that you can compose so delightfully. In a word, your Lied is beautiful. You must compose more often. - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

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.

Stay with me to-night; you must see me die. I have long had the taste of death on my tongue, I smell death, and who will stand by my Constanze, if you do not stay?

I should like to know for what reason idleness is so popular with many young people that it is impossible to dissuade them from it either by words or by chastisements.