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

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

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

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

Life without music is unthinkable.

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.

The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm

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.

A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .

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

It's all very well to say beauty is under the skin, or in the eye of the beholder, but no-one would say no to being prettier if they had the chance, so it is all rot.

I still haven't found the humor in getting hit by a cement truck. My knees still hurt when I think about it, so no jokes about that yet.

More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.

The big question is: how do you institutionalize success and still keep that edge of craziness and wildeness?

There is the love of knowing without the love of learning; the beclouding here leads to dissipation of mind.

I love opposition that has convictions.

The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

Kids have awkward moments.

The universe has no mind and that's why it can never reach perfection! Perfection is the art of meticulous high-mind!

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.