Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else.
DUKE ELLINGTONGray skies are just clouds passing over.
More Duke Ellington Quotes
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The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
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Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.
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Everyone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.
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Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
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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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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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You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it’s bad.
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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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Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.
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On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.
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There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.
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Dancing is very important to people who play music with a beat. I think that people who don’t dance, or who never did dance, don’t really understand the beat. I know musicians who don’t and never did dance, and they have difficulty communicating.
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A musical profit outweighs a financial loss.
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Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.
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There are two kinds of worries – those you can do something about and those you can’t. Don’t spend any time on the latter.
DUKE ELLINGTON