"To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time."
"I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing."
"It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion."
"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."
"I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer."
"The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle."
"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."
"When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer."
"Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale."
"It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once."
"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."
"I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic."
"In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing."
"Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors."
"It 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."
"A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers."
Leonard Bernstein Quotes About Music
"I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it ."
"The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial."
"Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic."
"Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable."
"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before."
"Life without music is unthinkable."
"If you're a good composer, you steal good steals."