Leonard Bernstein > Quotes

“Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
― Leonard Bernstein

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

“This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.”
― Leonard Bernstein

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

“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.”
― Leonard Bernstein

“Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”
― Leonard Bernstein

“I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”
― Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard

“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.”
― Leonard Bernstein

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

“We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!”
― Leonard Bernstein, Candide