Duke Ellington

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

There is no art without intention.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

My attitude is never to be satisfied, never enough, never.

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.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

If someone out there doesn’t agree with me, then somewhere a village is missing their idiot.

Once you discover that you can, then you must.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

If you wish to clear away the clouds of thought, simply keep your mind in the present.

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth.

You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.

There can be no lasting peace where hatred exists. Hatreds will continue to arise as long as the causes of war are not rooted out and exposed.

There is nothing ever wrong with ability, ambition, achievement; but they can easily be wronged by being used to bad ends.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta give yourself what you wish you were getting from someone else.

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.

If you ever get started on the right path to change, there is one important precondition you have to meet. You must rid yourself of that gnawing and overpowering sense of urgency and panic that always seems to appear on the scene.

You are the fever that never broke, the name stuck in my throat. You are every letter of every word in every poem I ever wrote.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

You’re never given more pain than you can handle. You never, ever get more than you can take.