Daily Inspiration Quote by Ned Rorem

Art isn’t bravery for bravery’s sake; it’s bravery with receipts. When composer Ned Rorem says, "Art means to dare - and to have been right", he turns the romantic myth of the suffering, misunderstood creator into something colder and more demanding. Daring is the entry fee. "To have been right" is the verdict history delivers after the fact.

Rorem’s phrasing is slyly double-edged. It flatters the artist’s appetite for risk, then immediately denies risk its halo. Plenty of people dare; most of them are merely noisy. The second clause implies that art isn’t completed in the studio or at the premiere. It’s completed when the gamble proves itself: when the work keeps yielding meaning, pleasure, shock, recognition; when it makes later listeners feel the world has subtly re-ordered around it. The line also smuggles in a critique of aesthetic posturing. In Rorem’s world, experimentation without coherence is just a personal diary with better lighting.

Context matters: Rorem came of age in a mid-century classical scene split between academic modernism, fashionable systems, and a public often suspicious of new music. He wrote in a voice that could be lyrical, candid, and unapologetically personal, sometimes at odds with the era’s prestige languages. "Right" here isn’t about moral correctness or consensus; it’s about accuracy of instinct. The dare is to trust your ear against the trend. The punishment is oblivion. The reward is that rare, retroactive click when a culture admits the risk was necessary.