Leonard Bernstein Quotes

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Life without music is unthinkable.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

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 .

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

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.

I think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list. When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. But as long as we insist on maintaining artistic vitality, we are able to hope in man

To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

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.

Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.

Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.

I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.

The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.

From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.

Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

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.

We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.

Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.

I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.

Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.

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.

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.

It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.

I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.

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?

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.

I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including natural scenery, organized piety and nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the mountain disappear for me, one person fighting for truth can disqualify for me the entire system which had dispensed it.

The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.

When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.

When the thunder rumbles, Now the age of gold is dead. When the dreams we've clung to Trying to stay young, Have left us parched and old instead. When my courage crumbles, When I feel confused and frail, When my spirit falters on decaying altars And my illusions fail -- I go on right then. I go on again. I go on to say I will celebrate another day. I go on. If tomorrow tumbles And everything I love is gone, I will face regret all my days, and yet I will still go on.

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.

Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.

Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.