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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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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
Like
Free
Reach
Farthest
Experience
Lived
Renew
Dream
Meditation
Hostility
Human
Poet
Stillness
Humans
Highest
Emotionally
Great
Dreams
Cells
Every
Prayer
Active
Life
Sleep
Angel
Industriously

More quotes by 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.
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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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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.
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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.
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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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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.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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