Quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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

“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.”

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

“The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... ...”

“I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.”

“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'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”

“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 l...”

“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 are endowed with the powers of fantasy, the dullest of dulla...”

“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.”

“Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.”

“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.”

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

“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 t...”

“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 ...”

“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 ...”

“Any great work of art … 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 a...”

“The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world.”