Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, and author. One of the most influential figures in 20th-century classical music, he served as music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969, composed the score for West Side Story, and created groundbreaking works such as Candide, Chichester Psalms, and his three symphonies. Through his Young People’s Concerts on television, lectures, and books like The Joy of Music, Bernstein brought classical music to millions, making it accessible and exciting to new generations.

The composer Aaron Copland, Bernstein’s mentor, said of him: “Lenny is the ideal teacher—his enthusiasm is contagious, his knowledge profound, and his love for music boundless.” Below, we list some words of wisdom from Leonard Bernstein, drawn from his lectures, interviews, writings, and public statements.

“To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.”

“I think that what you’ve got to do is discover the essential truth of the situation, and make a judgment about it.”

“The gift of creativity is that it is a gift to others as well as to oneself.”

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

“The best way to know a thing is to be part of it.”

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

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

“The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close one’s eyes to reality—but that is the coward’s way.”

“Faith is not certainty; it is the courage to live with uncertainty.”

“The only way I have of knowing I’ve done any good is by being told.”

“A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested. A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.”

“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.”

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

“This joy of discovery is one of the things that makes music so exciting.”

“The point of all this is that we are living in a time of tremendous change, and the only way to survive is to be open to change.”

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

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

“Music … can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”

“Ambiguity is the very essence of an artist.”

“This is the moment of truth for the artist: when he must decide whether to go on or to stop.”

“Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unencumbered with ideas, unburdened by the need to explain itself.”

“In music, everything must be at once clear and mysterious.”

“The only honest art is that which is created out of necessity.”

“Any composer’s writing is autobiographical.”

“Art always mirrors the society in which it is created.”

“Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.”

“The joy and suffering of those who create are the same joy and suffering of those who listen.”

“Music is the one form of communication that can reach everyone, regardless of language or culture.”


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