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.

Leonard Bernstein
About This Quote

Any great art work of any kind, of course, is an attempt to communicate with other people and to help them communicate. But it is also an attempt to communicate with the past and the future - with the works of the dead and with what we wish we had done and what we hope we will do. In this way it is a sort of pilgrimage.

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More Quotes By Leonard Bernstein
  1. To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.
  2. 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,...
  3. 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,...
  4. Music .. . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
  5. This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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