Leonard Bernstein Quotes

Music ... can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time ... The wait is simply too long.”

— Leonard Bernstein

We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!

— Leonard Bernstein

“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 are endowed with the powers of fantasy, the dullest of dullards among us has the gift of dreams at night - visions and yearnings and hopes. Everyone can also think; it is the quality thought that makes the difference - not just the quality of logical thinking, but of imaginative thinking. And our greatest thinkers, those who have radically changed our world, have always arrived at their truths by dreaming them; they are first fantasized, and only then subjected to proof.”

— Leonard Bernstein

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

“I also believe, along with Keats, that the Poetry of Earth is never dead, as long as Spring succeeds Winter, and man is there to perceive it ... And finally, I believe that because all these things are true, Ives' Unanswered Question has an answer. I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I know the answer is Yes.”

— Leonard Bernstein

“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

“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.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

“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

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

“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

“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

“Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.”

— Leonard Bernstein

“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

“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

“Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.”

— Leonard Bernstein

“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

“Life without music is unthinkable.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

“What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

“I hate you, Richard Wagner ... but I hate you on my knees.”

— Leonard Bernstein

“When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

“We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind.”

— Leonard Bernstein

“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

“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

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

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

— Leonard Bernstein

“When the thunder rumbles,
Now the age of gold is dead.
When the dreams we've clung to
Trying to stay young,
Have left us parched and old instead.
When my courage crumbles,
When I feel confused and frail,
When my spirit falters on decaying altars
And my illusions fail
I go on right then.
I go on again.
I go on to say I will celebrate another day.
I go on.
If tomorrow tumbles
And everything I love is gone,
I will face regret all my days, and yet
I will still go on.”

— Leonard Bernstein

“Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

“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

“I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including natural scenery, organized piety and nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the mountain disappear for me, one person fighting for truth can disqualify for me the entire system which had dispensed it.”

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

“I think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list. When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. But as long as we insist on maintaining artistic vitality, we are able to hope in man”

— Leonard Bernstein