Leonard Bernstein Quotes
To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.
The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm
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.
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.
The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
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.
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.
Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?
When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.
Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.
Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years.
This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
