Daniel Barenboim Quotes

I do remember when it occurred to me the first time, when I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment. I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting.

For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.

The power of music is real.

One of the most extraordinary and all-encompassing forms of communication is music. It reaches places that all kinds of other things cannot reach. I'll put my cards on the table: I think it is our greatest language.

I truly believe that music is the most powerful thing we have.

If there is one thing that is constant in this world, it is the power of music.

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

I endeavor to make a picture, for instance, exert a positive influence on the observer by its coloring, mood, and compositional idea, encouraging, say, activation, tranquilization, concentration, or harmony.

My work is immaterial. It's not painting, it's not sculpture, it's emotions. I'm giving you something to experience yourself.

Music is life. Music defines peoples' experience on this planet.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus not imitation. From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life - all movement and rhythm - time and light, color and mood - in short, all reality in Form and Thought.

As I understand life at different levels, I can use music to express what these levels feel like to me. Hopefully the listener can be transported to this understanding by listening to the music.

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.

Music is the greatest communication in the world.

It's not that music is too imprecise for words, but too precise.

I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.

Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you.

Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.

tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.

... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art -- plastic, musical, poetic, balletic -- serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.