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Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?

— Leonard Bernstein The Unanswered Question (1976)

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More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation.

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.

The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world.

Ned Rorem Paris Diary (1966)

Any great work of art … 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.

Callas? She was pure electricity.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Leonard Bernstein (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.