Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited.
DUKE ELLINGTONEveryone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.
More Duke Ellington Quotes
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Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.
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I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.
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Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.
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The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
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I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline!
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Gray skies are just clouds passing over.
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Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.
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Yet, every time God’s children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened.
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I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
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Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.
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The Europeans who went to Africa came back with “modern’ art. What is more African than a Picasso?
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Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.
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The problem of expressing the contributions that Benny Carter has made to popular music is so tremendous it completely fazes me, so extraordinary a musician is he.
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It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line
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The artist must say it without saying it.
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Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.
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Everybody in Canada seemed to listen to what they enjoyed, and nobody could tell them what to like, or what was the popular, or what was the In thing. Even today, it is very hard to brainwash a Canadian.
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Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.
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There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.
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Self-discipline, as a virtue or an acquired asset, can be invaluable to anyone.
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Tomorrow is in the wings waiting for you to sound her entrance fanfare.
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You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it’s bad.
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Critics have their purposes, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.
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A Satin Doll is a woman who is as pretty on the inside as she is on the outside.
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Somehow I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself.
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Of the One O’Clock Lab Band after hearing their performance, and sitting in with them at the White House: “I wish it were mine”.
DUKE ELLINGTON