Leonard Bernstein quotes

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. (Leonard Bernstein)
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
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. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
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. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
Music... can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
Any great work of art ... 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. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic. (Leonard Bernstein)
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning... except its own. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
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. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy ... I don't dare continue. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it, or thinking about it . View quote
Leonard Bernstein
So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery? View quote
Leonard Bernstein
To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
Callas? She was pure electricity. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
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. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world. (Leonard Bernstein)
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
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. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion. View quote
Leonard Bernstein
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. View quote
Leonard Bernstein