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Quotes by Leonard Bernstein

  • I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • It was an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn, that was revealed to me by my BLS masters as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition-that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else.
  • 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.
  • Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
  • 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.