Top 60 Duke Ellington Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A problem is a chance for you to do your best.”

— Duke Ellington

Featured in: Excellence Quotes

2. “I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline!”

— Duke Ellington

3. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

— Duke Ellington

4. “Simplicity is a most complex form.”

— Duke Ellington

Featured in: Simplicity Quotes

5. “If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!”

— Duke Ellington

6. “Without a deadline, baby, I wouldn’t do nothing.”

— Duke Ellington

7. “If you have a great band with a mediocre drummer, you have a mediocre band. If you have a mediocre band with a great drummer, you have a great band!”

— Duke Ellington

8. “Gray skies are just clouds passing over.”

— Duke Ellington

9. “Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don’t want it.”

— Duke Ellington

10. “The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.”

— Duke Ellington

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

— Duke Ellington

12. “There is no art without intention.”

— Duke Ellington

13. “There are two kinds of worries – those you can do something about and those you can’t. Don’t spend any time on the latter.”

— Duke Ellington

14. “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!”

— Duke Ellington

15. “Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.”

— Duke Ellington

16. “Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.”

— Duke Ellington

17. “Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.”

— Duke Ellington

18. “People do not retire. They are retired by others.”

— Duke Ellington

19. “Create, and be true to yourself, and depend only on your own good taste.”

— Duke Ellington

20. “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.”

— Duke Ellington

21. “Music is the tonal reflection of beauty.”

— Duke Ellington

22. “A Satin Doll is a woman who is as pretty on the inside as she is on the outside.”

— Duke Ellington

23. “I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.”

— Duke Ellington

24. “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.”

— Duke Ellington

25. “What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?”

— Duke Ellington

26. “Self-discipline, as a virtue or an acquired asset, can be invaluable to anyone.”

— Duke Ellington

27. “Everyone prays in their own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.”

— Duke Ellington

28. “You’ve got to find a way of saying it without saying it.”

— Duke Ellington

29. “Sing sweet, but put a little dirt in it.”

— Duke Ellington

30. “Somehow I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, he might be a jazz fan himself.”

— Duke Ellington

31. “Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited.”

— Duke Ellington

32. “Every man prays in his own language.”

— Duke Ellington

33. “I don’t need time, I need a deadline.”

— Duke Ellington

34. “By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.”

— Duke Ellington

35. “I like any and all of my associations with music -writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.”

— Duke Ellington

36. “Critics have their purposes, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.”

— Duke Ellington

37. “If it sounds good, it IS good.”

— Duke Ellington

38. “A musical profit outweighs a financial loss.”

— Duke Ellington

39. “Be a number one yourself. And not a number two somebody else.”

— Duke Ellington

40. “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.”

— Duke Ellington

41. “Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.”

— Duke Ellington

42. “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.”

— Duke Ellington

43. “You have to stop listening in categories. The music is either good or it’s bad.”

— Duke Ellington

44. “Roaming through the jungle of “Ohs” and “Ahs” searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.”

— Duke Ellington

45. “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.”

— Duke Ellington

46. “Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.”

— Duke Ellington

47. “Hurry, get on board, it’s comin’, listen to those rails a-thrumming all aboard. Get on the “A” train, soon you will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem.”

— Duke Ellington

48. “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.”

— Duke Ellington

49. “Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.”

— Duke Ellington

50. “New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillacs, and beggars die of malnutrition with thousands of dollars hidden in their mattresses.”

— Duke Ellington