QUOTES by Duke Ellington

Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.

"There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind ... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"I began by tinkering around with some old tunes I knew. Then, just to try something different, I set to putting some music to the rhythm that I used in jerking ice-cream sodas at the Poodle Dog. I fooled around with the tune more and more until at last, lo and behold, I had completed my first piece of finished music."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"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."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"San Francisco is one of the great cultural plateaus of the world - one of the really urbane communities in the United States - one of the truly cosmopolitan places and for many, many years, it always has had a warm welcome for human beings from all over the world"
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"In music, as you develop a theme or musical idea, there are many points at which directions must be decided, and at any time I was in the throes of debate with myself, harmonically or melodically, I would turn to Billy Strayhorn. We would talk, and then the whole world would come into focus. The steady hand of his good judgment pointed to the clear way that was fitting for us. He was not, as he was often referred to by many, my alter ego. Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original. ... I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. ... I don't need time, I need a deadline. ...There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind. ... Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line"
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"My mother told me I was blessed, and I have always taken her word for it. Being born of - or reincarnated from - royalty is nothing Like being blessed. Royalty is inherited from another human being; blessedness comes from God."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"How can anyone expect to be understood unless he presents his thoughts with complete honesty? This situation is unfair because it asks too much of the world. In effect, we say, ' I don't dare show you what I am because I don't trust you for a minute but please love me anyway because I so need you to. And, of course, if you don't love me anyway, you're a dirty dog, just as I suspected, so I was right in the first place.' Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom... In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"You can’t write music right unless you know how the man that’ll play it plays poker."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"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."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"There are 2 rules in life: Number 1- Never quit Number2- Never forget rule number 1."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"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."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it's bad."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Everyone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"A goal is a dream with a finish line."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"The Europeans who went to Africa came back with “modern' art. What is more African than a Picasso?"
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Simplicity is a most complex form"
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"You've got to find a way of saying it without saying it."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Everybody in Canada seemed to listen to what they enjoyed, and nobody could tell them what to like, or what was the popular, or what was the In thing. Even today, it is very hard to brainwash a Canadian."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"There is nothing to keeping a band together. You simply have to have a gimmick, and the gimmick I use is to pay them money!"
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is. Either you have it or you haven't; there's no proof of it."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Self-discipline, as a virtue or an acquired asset, can be invaluable to anyone."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"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."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"A musical profit outweighs a financial loss."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"There is no art without intention."

Quote by - Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

Download

"Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!"
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Somehow I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Problems are chances for us to do our best."

Quote by - Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

Download

"The artist must say it without saying it."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"I don't need time. What I need is a deadline!"
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"It's like an act of murder-you play with intent to commit something."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"My biggest kick in music -playing or writing- is when I have a problem. Without a problem to solve, how much interest do you take in anything?"
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"A Satin Doll is a woman who is as pretty on the inside as she is on the outside."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment

"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it."
Quote by -

Duke Ellington

(0) Like

(0) Favourite

(0) Comment