Daniel Barenboim Quotes
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What the world is saying to us human beings is, 'Don't stick to the old ways, learn to think anew.' And that's what musicians do every day.
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US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan.
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I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.
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I am convinced that 100 years from now, people will talk about Elliott Carter as one of the most important figures in the second half of 20th-century music.
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Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.
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I know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.
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We need to take music out of the ivory tower - both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.
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It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.
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I don't like possessions.
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Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.
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Israel is in the grip of a ghetto mentality. We have a powerful army. We have the atomic bomb. But the psychology of what comes out of Israel has the tone of the Warsaw Ghetto.
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In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.
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We need a certain amount of energy to produce the sound. But then to sustain it, we have to give more energy, or otherwise, it goes and it dies in silence. And therefore, sound is absolutely, inextricably connected to time, the length of time.
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Every concert I've finished with the knowledge I've played a fistful of wrong notes.
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I don't think I'm anti-Israeli.
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I am permanently relaxed.
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I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.
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Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.
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No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.
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I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.
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There are wonderful restaurants in London. I love Indian food and I like Arab food, and I go very often to the Arab restaurant Noura.
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To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.
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The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.
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Live life to the full, and become more curious every day. The more you find out about life, the richer your music-making will be.