Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace. (Leonard Bernstein)
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. (Leonard Bernstein)
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors. (Leonard Bernstein)
Any great work of art ... 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)
It was an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn . . . as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition - that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else. (Leonard Bernstein)
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. (Leonard Bernstein)
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer. (Leonard Bernstein)
Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. (Leonard Bernstein)
In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing. (Leonard Bernstein)
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. (Leonard Bernstein)
To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time. (Leonard Bernstein)
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. (Leonard Bernstein)