Leonard Bernstein Quotes

37 quotes in 557 categories

• This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
• 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,…
• To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
• 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…
• Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
• I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
• 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.
• Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
• From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
• The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
• I believe that from the earth emerges a musical poetry that is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause…
• Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
• 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…
• Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
• 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…
• Life without music is unthinkable.
• A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
• 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…
• I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
• 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…

Browse Leonard Bernstein Quotes by Category