Leonard Bernstein Music Quotations

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

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.

Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.

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

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.

I believe that from the earth emerges a musical poetry that is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal, and is known as the harmonic series.

Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years.

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

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

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

Life without music is unthinkable.

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