From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a renewed optimism that comes with the New Year and a commitment to positive thinking.
Leonard Bernstein reflects on the transformative power of the New Year as a time when people's attitudes shift towards positivity and hope. The quote emphasizes the importance of letting go of negativity and cultivating a mindset focused on gratitude and resolve, encouraging individuals to actively choose optimism and stop dwelling on complaints.
In practice
Sharing this quote during a New Year's celebration to inspire others.
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.
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.
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.
The battle for women's rights has been largely won.
And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
Reform is for people who have government connections, revolution is for the people!
In so far as the government lands can be disposed of, I am in favor of cutting up the wild lands into parcels so that every poor man may have a home.
Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.
There shouldn't be any looting or anything like that. But we're seeing a lot of frustration, and nobody knows the answer. All of us are saying we need an answer, and what I'm saying is we need, all of us, a heart change so, as America, we can move forward.
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