Leonard Bernstein was an American composer, conductor, and educator. He is known for his compositions including West Side Story and On the Town, and for his acclaimed conducting of the New York Philharmonic. He was also a renowned music educator, hosting the television show Young People's Concerts, and was the first American-born conductor to lead the New York Philharmonic.
What is the most famous quote by Leonard Bernstein ?
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.
— Leonard Bernstein
What can you learn from Leonard Bernstein (Life Lessons)
- Leonard Bernstein taught us to never give up on our dreams, no matter how difficult they may seem. He worked hard to achieve his goals and persevered even when faced with adversity.
- He also showed us the importance of collaboration and teamwork in order to achieve success. He worked with many talented individuals to create some of the most iconic musical works of the 20th century.
- Finally, Bernstein also taught us the importance of giving back to the community. He was a passionate advocate for music education and was committed to making music accessible to everyone.
The most glamorous Leonard Bernstein quotes that will activate your desire to change
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various Leonard Bernstein inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Leonard Bernstein.
To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
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.
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.
Life without music is unthinkable.
The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm
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.
Dynamic quotes by Leonard Bernstein
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.
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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.
The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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.
The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
From New Year's on the outlook brightens;
good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Quotations by Leonard Bernstein that are innovative and iconic
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.
Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.
This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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.
The Rhapsody is not a composition at all.
It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time
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.
Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.
" So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?
I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including natural scenery, organized piety and nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the mountain disappear for me, one person fighting for truth can disqualify for me the entire system which had dispensed 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.
The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.
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.
Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.
Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
I hate you, Richard Wagner . . . but I hate you on my knees.
Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.
It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.
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.
Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
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.
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.