X

Sort by

Quote length

Sentiment

Change font

Change background

Leonard Bernstein Inspirational Quotes (33)

Page 1 of 2
Filter & Style
Image
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which 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 known as the harmonic series.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
Leonard Bernstein
Image
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
Leonard Bernstein
Image
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
From New Year's on the outlook brightens good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
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
Previous
Next