QuoteProject
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
Leonard Bernstein
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Great artists sacrifice their personal energies to create harmonious works that evoke feelings of correctness and beauty in the world.

This quote by Leonard Bernstein emphasizes the dedication and selflessness required of a great artist. It suggests that artists pour their energy and life into their creations, often without fully understanding the reasons behind their passion. Their goal is to produce art that resonates deeply with others, inspiring a sense of harmony and rightness in the world.

Themes

ArtArtistCreativitySacrificeHarmony

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be shared at an art exhibit to express the passion of the artists featured.

More from Leonard Bernstein

From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Leonard BernsteinRead
Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.
Leonard BernsteinRead
Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
Leonard BernsteinRead
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
Leonard BernsteinRead
Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great.
Leonard BernsteinRead
In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.
Leonard BernsteinRead

Similar quotes

The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
Simon SchamaRead
If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.
David BowieRead
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Henry David ThoreauRead
At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.
C. S. LewisRead
I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.
Zelda FitzgeraldRead
All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
Eric HofferRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.

Quote by Leonard Bernstein | QuoteProject