Quote

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

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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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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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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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.
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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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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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