"To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time."
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Quote collection
Leonard Bernstein quotes (page 1 of 3)
60 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable."
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"Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great."
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"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before."
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"Life without music is unthinkable."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm"
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"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."
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"A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers."
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"I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it ."
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"I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic."
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"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."
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"I think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list. When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. But as long as we insist on maintaining artistic vitality, we are able to hope in man"
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"To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both."
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"You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over."
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"The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial."
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"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."
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"Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel."
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"Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic."
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