From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Leonard BernsteinRead
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.
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
All quotes →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
All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
Gaston BachelardRead
Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.
Jonathan Safran FoerRead
I'm not an actor because I want my picture taken. I'm an actor because I want to be part of the human exchange.
Frances McdormandRead
Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.
Muriel BarberyRead
If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.
Paul SchraderRead
Nobody really needs a painting. It's something you kind of create value for in a way that you don't with a company. It's an act of collective faith what an object is worth. Maintaining that value system is part of what a dealer does, not just making a transaction but making sure that important art feels important.
Larry GagosianRead