Leonard Bernstein Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“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.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“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.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“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.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”
-- 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.”
-- 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.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.”
-- 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.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“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.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“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.”
-- 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.”
-- Leonard Bernstein -
“From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.”
-- Leonard Bernstein