82 Quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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

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.

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

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

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.

The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.

Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

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

I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.