Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard BernsteinWhen the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.
Leonard BernsteinMozart 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 BernsteinI 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.
Leonard BernsteinA 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 BernsteinWine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
Leonard BernsteinEinstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?
Leonard BernsteinInspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
Leonard BernsteinEven 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 BernsteinI 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 BernsteinChildren 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.
Leonard BernsteinTo achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard BernsteinFrom New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Leonard BernsteinIn the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.
Leonard BernsteinMozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard BernsteinLife without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard BernsteinOur 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 BernsteinWhat [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 BernsteinThe 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 BernsteinIt is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.
Leonard BernsteinThe 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 BernsteinThis will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard BernsteinWhen I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.
Leonard BernsteinThe second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm
Leonard BernsteinIt is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
Leonard BernsteinI think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list. When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. But as long as we insist on maintaining artistic vitality, we are able to hope in man
Leonard BernsteinI'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Leonard BernsteinThis 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.
Leonard BernsteinIt would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein