30 Thought-Provoking Quotes By Leonard Bernstein, The Music Maestro
Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
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
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.
The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm
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 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.
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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 .
The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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.
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've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
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.
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good We'll do the best we know. We'll build our house and chop our wood And make our garden grow. And make our garden grow!
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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.
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.
