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When you go out onto the stage, all the preparation has to be forced into your subconscious. For the moment of the performance, we all have to return to a new level of unconsciousness. All the reflection and all the doubts have to be laid aside before you start.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Preparation should become second nature, allowing focus during performance.

This quote emphasizes the importance of subconscious preparation before a performance, suggesting that thorough practice should lead to a state of unconscious competence. When stepping onto the stage, performers should let go of doubts and reflections, enabling them to be fully present and engaged in their art.

Themes

PreparationPerformanceSubconsciousConfidenceArt

In practice

Example use cases

A motivational speaker might use this quote before addressing an audience to emphasize the need for confidence.

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Within each individual young person you meet, you have the same fields to plough. The trick is just to wake them up, to sharpen their ears for what's already there in the music.
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