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.

The best way to know a thing is to do it.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

The most important thing in music is the next note.

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 with the inevitability of fate.

Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.

The greatest music is that which is most human.

Music, of all the arts, is the most abstract and the most profound.

The true joy of music is to be found in its creation, not in its performance.

I don't understand music unless I'm conducting it.

The conductor must not only be a musician, but a psychologist, a diplomat, a philosopher, and a showman.

Music is the most powerful form of communication in the world.

The artist's job is to make the world a better place.

I am not a composer who conducts, or a conductor who composes. I am a musician.

The greatest gift you can give an audience is to be yourself.

The artist must be a lover of life, not a hater of it.

Music is the language of the soul.