Quotes from Leonard Bernstein

Life without music is unthinkable.

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

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.

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.

Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.

Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.

It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.

Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.

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.

From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.

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.

Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff

Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.

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

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

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.

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

I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.

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.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

Any great work of art revives and readapts times 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.