Leonard Bernstein Quotes

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

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

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

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

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.

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.

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.

I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.

Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.

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.