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

“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 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

“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'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

“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

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

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