Leonard Bernstein Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

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

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

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?

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.

Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.