Leonard Bernstein Quotes

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

I hate you, Richard Wagner . . . but I hate you on my knees.

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

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

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

When the thunder rumbles,
Now the age of gold is dead.
When the dreams we’ve clung to
Trying to stay young,
Have left us parched and old instead.
When my courage crumbles,
When I feel confused and frail,
When my spirit falters on decaying altars
And my illusions fail —
I go on right then.
I go on again.
I go on to say I will celebrate another day.
I go on.
If tomorrow tumbles
And everything I love is gone,
I will face regret all my days, and yet
I will still go on.

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

If you’re a good composer, you steal good steals.

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.

…we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.

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.

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.