Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.
Ludwig Van BeethovenRead
Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.
Interpretation
Teach your children about virtue as it leads to true happiness, rather than just focusing on material wealth.
In this quote, Beethoven emphasizes the importance of instilling values of virtue in children over material wealth. He suggests that moral integrity and character are essential for achieving genuine happiness in life, and he draws from his own experiences to assert that these virtues will serve them better in the long run than a pursuit of money or material possessions.
In practice
In a parenting workshop discussing values, this quote can highlight the importance of teaching children virtues.
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.
I alter some things, eliminate and try again until I am satisfied. Then begins the mental working out of this material in its breadth, its narrowness, its height and depth.
Often, I can scarcely hear any one speaking to me; the tones yes, but not the actual words; yet as soon as any one shouts, it is unbearable. What will come of all this, heaven only knows!
Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.
I carry my thoughts about me for a long time, often a very long time, before I write them down; meanwhile my memory is so faithful that I am sure never to forget, not even in years, a theme that has once occurred to me.
I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.
Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.
The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers.
If I look back down the years, how I was treated as a kid, if it wasn't for the teachers at my school, then I wouldn't have achieved what I have. You have to look where you came from, and we do need to get more parents involved, more running clubs and more schools. They can make a difference.
To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.
'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.
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