Chet Baker

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

What a fool I am to think my breaking heart could kid the moon.

He almost adds a Chet-like sound to it.

Love is not the absence of hate; hate will always exist. Love is holding our head high and forever moving forward with kindness and compassion in spite of what hate may bring, because no amount of darkness can drown out our light if our light has been lit within.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

The more a man knows, the more he forgives.

We want to reproduce all those instruments which were prepared and used in America once upon a time.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

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.

That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

And of all the things I look forward to in life, falling in love with you is at the top of the list.

In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

Every situation needs a hero. Step up and be that for your child.