Top 40 Leonard Bernstein Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

3. “I can’t live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it, or thinking about it .”

— Leonard Bernstein

4. “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.”

— Leonard Bernstein

5. “I’ve been all over the world and I’ve never seen a statue of a critic.”

— Leonard Bernstein

6. “Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.”

— Leonard Bernstein

7. “You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn’t matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.”

— Leonard Bernstein

8. “The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.”

— Leonard Bernstein

9. “Life without music is unthinkable.”

— Leonard Bernstein

10. “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.”

— Leonard Bernstein

11. “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.”

— Leonard Bernstein

12. “I believe that man’s noblest endowment is his capacity to change.”

— Leonard Bernstein

13. “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.”

— Leonard Bernstein

14. “This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.”

— Leonard Bernstein

15. “Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart’s – the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering – a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.”

— Leonard Bernstein

16. “Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.”

— Leonard Bernstein

17. “Success is all very well as long as you don’t inhale.”

— Leonard Bernstein

18. “It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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20. “I believe that from the earth emerges a musical poetry that is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal, and is known as the harmonic series.”

— Leonard Bernstein

21. “I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.”

— Leonard Bernstein

22. “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.”

— Leonard Bernstein

23. “Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”

— Leonard Bernstein

24. “Two things are necessary for great achievement: a plan and not quite enough time.”

— Leonard Bernstein

25. “Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.”

— Leonard Bernstein

26. “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

27. “The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.”

— Leonard Bernstein

28. “The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.”

— Leonard Bernstein

29. “If you’re a good composer, you steal good steals.”

— Leonard Bernstein

30. “When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.”

— Leonard Bernstein

31. “There are two ways to think about all this. One way is that life is absurd to start with and that only a mad man goes out and tries to change the world, to fight for good and against evil. The other way is that life is indeed absurd to start with and that it can be given meaning only if you live it for your ideals, visions and poetic truths, and despite all the skepticism of all the Sancho Panzas’ in the world, saddle up whatever worn out horse you’ve got and go after those visions.”

— Leonard Bernstein

32. “To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I’m both.”

— Leonard Bernstein

33. “I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

35. “Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

38. “The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.”

— Leonard Bernstein

39. “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.”

— Leonard Bernstein

40. “Mozart’s music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.”

— Leonard Bernstein

41. “Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?”

— Leonard Bernstein

42. “It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.”

— Leonard Bernstein

43. “I’m not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.”

— Leonard Bernstein

44. “Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.”

— Leonard Bernstein