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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
Communicate
Name
Names
Music
Unknowable
Metaphorical
Specific
Reaching
Powers

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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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
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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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Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.
Leonard Bernstein
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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein
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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
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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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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
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
Leonard Bernstein
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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
Leonard Bernstein
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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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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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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
Leonard Bernstein
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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
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
Leonard Bernstein