From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the hopeful and optimistic nature of a liberal perspective on life.
Leonard Bernstein's quote celebrates the optimistic outlook associated with liberalism, suggesting that true liberals possess an inherent desire for progress, peace, and a promising future. It encapsulates the ideals of looking forward towards better days and the belief in an endless potential for improvement in society, highlighting a hopeful vision that encompasses all ages.
In practice
In a discussion about political ideologies, one might reference this quote to highlight the positive vision of the future associated with liberal values.
From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
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.
Any great art work β¦ 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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
A lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing.
Openness isn't the end. It's the beginning.
To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming β like worms when a rock is lifted β under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
There is little difference between the Zulu warrior who smeared bis body with lion's fat and the modern woman who dabs hers with expensive perfume. The one was trying to acquire the courage of the king of beasts, the other is attempting to acquire the irresistible sexuality of flowers. The underlying principle is the same.
During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.
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