Leonard Bernstein Quotes
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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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When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.
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The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.
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Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.
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When the thunder rumbles, Now the age of gold is dead. When the dreams we've clung to Trying to stay young, Have left us parched and old instead. When my courage crumbles, When I feel confused and frail, When my spirit falters on decaying altars And my illusions fail -- I go on right then. I go on again. I go on to say I will celebrate another day. I go on. If tomorrow tumbles And everything I love is gone, I will face regret all my days, and yet I will still go on.
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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
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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.
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The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
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I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including natural scenery, organized piety and nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the mountain disappear for me, one person fighting for truth can disqualify for me the entire system which had dispensed it.
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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.
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Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years.
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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 hate you, Richard Wagner . . . but I hate you on my knees.
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We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind.
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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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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great.
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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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It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
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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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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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