Ahmad Jamal

You don’t create things, you discover things.

You’ve got a big, big problem if you get caught up in what people say. If you’re gonna live for what people say, you might as well lay down and forget it. Because it doesn’t work that way.

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

The quickest way to become troubled is to be concerned with what people are gonna say about your life and your work.

I would like to be a scholar in whatever I do, a scholar is never finished, he is always seeking and I am always seeking.

Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.

Grief never mended no broken bones.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

Life is a helluva lot more fun if you say yes rather than no.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

They ask me how I love you and I say in pages, in novels, in volumes. I love you like my favorite story, the one that I wake up to every day and watch unfold. And I don’t know how it ends, but I know your name is already written in the chapters of my life that I have yet to live.

I never apologize. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way I am.

The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

There are certain things we come into this world having to defeat.

When you don’t have much money, you worry that they’ll just put you in the ground someplace and your loved ones won’t know where you are.

I feel like I got a pile of cattle chasing my ass, and I’m pedaling as hard as I can to stay in front of ‘em. I’m looking behind me driving like hell.

To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.