Ahmad Jamal

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

You don’t create things, you discover things.

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

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.

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

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.

The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

My first task is to help students reject 18 years of poor learning that teaches them that knowledge is a product rather than a process.

I have been learning English on the road since I started when I was 15, so it is a slow process but making some progress. Now I think I am much more comfortable with my English. However, it is difficult, still, when I speak about something that is not tennis.

That experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.

Education is the best provision for old age.

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.

A man’s college and university degrees mean nothing to me until I see what he is able to do with them.

My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately

Over the years, I have again and again asked fellow believers in a free society how they managed to escape the contagion of their collectivist intellectual environment. No name has been mentioned more often as the source of enlightenment than Friedrich Hayek’s.

We believe, that is, you and I, that education is not an expense. We believe it is an investment.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

You must work on improving your skills every day and never quit.

An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn’t take his education too seriously.

The educated Southerner has no use for an ‘R’, except at the beginning of a word.