On the 25th of August we will celebrate Leonard Bernstein's birthday, and what better way to do it than with some fabulous Leonard Bernstein quotes? Orchestra and theater fans everywhere appreciate Bernstein's contributions to the music world, but the man was much more than just a composer. He was, and is, an example and inspiration to those who love to create music. These 10 Leonard Bernstein quotes are perfect examples of why. 1. "Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable." 2. "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." 3. "I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer." 4. "Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace." 5. "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." 6. "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." 7. "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." 8. "The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial." 9. "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. 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." 10. "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 was many things. An artist, a composer, conductor and a pianist... Perhaps the most important of all is that he was a teacher and a mentor to some and an inspiration to many. These Leonard Bernstein quotes shed light on why so many listened when dear "Lenny" spoke.
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