Leonard Bernstein Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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

Leonard Bernstein
Music…can name the unnameable, and communicate the unknowable.

Leonard Bernstein
I believe that from the earth emerges a musical poetry that 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, and is known as the harmonic series.

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

Leonard Bernstein
Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

Leonard Bernstein
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.

Leonard Bernstein
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.

Leonard Bernstein
I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.

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, a meaning in musical terms, not in terms of words.

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
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.

Leonard Bernstein
The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy … I don't dare continue.

Leonard Bernstein
The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world.

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

Leonard Bernstein
A work of art does not answer questions: it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between their contradictory answers.

Leonard Bernstein
Any great work of art … 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
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 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.

Leonard Bernstein
Poetry and music—but especially music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers—can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Leonard Bernstein
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?

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
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it, or thinking about it.

Leonard Bernstein