Leonard Bernstein Quotes

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.

The love of, and challenge of, music was always there for me.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

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.

Technique and ability alone do not get you to the top; it is the willpower that is the most important.

I’m not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

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.

I’m no snob.

I’m not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

Conducting is the most non-speculative of the arts, with one possible exception: sculpture.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.

I’m an optimist, but I’m an optimist who carries a raincoat.

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning … except its own.

I’m interested in how best I can be of service to the composer; what is it that I can do that will make his work sound the way he intends it.

Once and for all, people, let’s have no more nonsense about the ‘past,’ no more whining and moaning about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and Beethoven died on the Fifth.

Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.

The only way to make music’s case is to play it; to sing it; to perform it.

Music is nothing more than a persuasion of all one’s emotions with the help of sounds.

The 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.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for t…