Leonard Bernstein

From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.

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.

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.

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.

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

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.

In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

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

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.

Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff

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