Daily Inspiration Quote by David Ogden Stiers

Stiers is describing art as something you don’t “get” once, but something that accrues meaning through repetition and variation - the way a face becomes familiar only after you’ve seen it in different light. The list is telling: orchestras, conductors, violinists, pianists, singers. He’s not just name-checking music-world roles; he’s mapping how interpretation works. Same score, different hands, and suddenly the piece isn’t a fixed object but a living argument about tempo, texture, breath, restraint.

Coming from an actor, the subtext is practically autobiographical. Performance is translation: you inherit a text and make it human again, with your particular instrument. Stiers implies that “the work” is bigger than any single definitive rendition, even the canonical one. If you only hear the masterpiece once, you’re really just hearing a moment - a snapshot of choices. Hearing it again, through other temperaments, reveals what was essential and what was merely stylistic. The work “reveals itself” because the noise of interpretation, paradoxically, clarifies the signal.

There’s also a quiet rebuke here to the modern hunger for instant comprehension: the playlist mentality that treats art as disposable content. Stiers argues for a slower kind of intimacy, where depth isn’t extracted but grown. “Begins to live deeper in you” lands emotionally because it frames listening as relationship, not consumption; the piece doesn’t just impress you, it takes up residence, changing shape as you do.