Leonard Bernstein Quotes

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

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

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

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

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

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.

Life without music is unthinkable.

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

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.

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.

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

The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm

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

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.

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.

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.