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

Leonard Bernstein Quotes

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

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— 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

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

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

— 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

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

Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

— Leonard Bernstein

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

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

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

— Leonard Bernstein
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