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.
Everything in Louisiana is about layers. There are layers of race, layers of class, layers of survival, layers of death, and layers of rebirth. To live with these layers is to be a true Louisianian. This state has a depth that is simultaneously beyond words and yet as natural as breathing. How can a place be both other-worldly and completely pedestrian is beyond me; however, Louisiana manages to do it. Louisiana is spooky that way.
There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.
Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn't be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans; in the New World, of course, they could and did.
If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.
God is subtle but he is not malicious.
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