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.

Leonard Bernstein

Categorized in : Thinking Water Tchaikovsky

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.

Leonard Bernstein

artist dream world

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

Leonard Bernstein

stress humor time

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Leonard Bernstein

ubuntu music peace

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.

Leonard Bernstein

prayer names ideas

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

Leonard Bernstein

communication music talking

Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.

Leonard Bernstein

academic music-is life-is

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

Leonard Bernstein

music spiritual art

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

keys artist giving

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

Leonard Bernstein

essentials doe art

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.

Leonard Bernstein

balls games children

The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm

Leonard Bernstein

enthusiasm play firsts

To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.

Leonard Bernstein

composer broadway gay

I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

Leonard Bernstein

statues critics world

We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind.

Leonard Bernstein

honor mind art

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.

Leonard Bernstein

success time motivational

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

Leonard Bernstein

hearing one-day thinking

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

Leonard Bernstein

metaphorical reaching names

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.

Leonard Bernstein

artist imagination mean

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.

Leonard Bernstein

creative imagination writing

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?

Leonard Bernstein

mysterious trying beautiful