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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Leonard Bernstein

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Leonard Bernstein
Age: 72 †
Born: 1918
Born: August 25
Died: 1990
Died: October 14
Associate Professor
Composer
Conductor
Film Score Composer
Musicologist
Pianist
Lawrence
Massachusetts
Louis Bernstein
Names
Music
Unknowable
Metaphorical
Specific
Reaching
Powers
Communicate
Name

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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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
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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
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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
Leonard Bernstein
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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
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From New Year's on the outlook brightens good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Leonard Bernstein
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein
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Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
Leonard Bernstein
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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
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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
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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
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
Leonard Bernstein
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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
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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
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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Leonard Bernstein
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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard Bernstein
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
Leonard Bernstein
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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
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein