Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

  • 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, infinite future.
  • To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.
  • I can’t live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it, or thinking about it.
  • 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.
  • I’m not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
  • 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.
  • If you’re a good composer, you steal good steals.
  • Art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. Art cannot change events, but it can affect people so that they are changed…enriched, ennobled, encouraged. They then act in a way that may affect the course of events…by the way they vote, the way they behave, the way they think.
  • Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
  • The best way to know a thing is in the context of another discipline.
  • 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.
  • I’ve been all over the world and I’ve never seen a statue of a critic.
  • The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
  • The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
  • 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.
  • Teaching is not just a dry business of scales and exercises and etudes; a great teacher is one who can light a spark in you.
  • Life without music is meaningless. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
  • Music; of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning except its own.
  • I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is “yes.”
  • It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
  • 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.
  • A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
  • 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.
  • 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.