Billy Strayhorn Quotes

#1. If you want something hard enough, it just gets done.

Billy Strayhorn

#2. But I understand your doubts. They're what make you a great man, not your certainties.

Louise Penny

#3. Ever up and onward.

Billy Strayhorn

#4. Don't perspire while conducting - only the audience should get warm.

Richard Strauss

#5. I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.

John Darnielle

#6. I'll live a lush life in some small dive.

Billy Strayhorn

#7. There's no music in rest, but there's the making of music in it. And people are always missing that part of the life melody, always talking of perseverance and courage and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the rarest, too.

John Ruskin

#8. Frightened, I jump up from the bank, the struggle begins anew. Bitterness has returned. I am not Pan in the reed, I am merely a human being and want to climb a few steps, but really climb them ...

Paul Klee

#9. All music is beautiful.

Billy Strayhorn

#10. I'm not fit company for man or beast.

Billy Strayhorn

#11. I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something.

Nicholas Sparks

#12. That's all I did - that's all I ever did - try to do what Billy Strayhorn did.

Gil Evans

#13. In order to play and write, it's unique - you either do one or the other.

Billy Strayhorn

#14. You're in a mess, and in excess.

Billy Strayhorn

#15. Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.

Quincy Jones

#16. No law was ever made by the people; they are made for the people

Clarence Darrow

#17. Let us return from that Table like lions breathing out fire, terrifying to the devil!

Saint John Chrysostom

#18. Scientists have wonderfully explained the organization of the universe, but that's really all it claims to do, and I think it does that very successfully.

Simon Conway Morris

#19. 'The Bradshaws' is the appropriately inappropriate English title given to an enigma - some hundreds of thousands of mysterious rock art paintings scattered through the wilds of the Kimberley, an area larger than Germany in the remote, scarcely populated northwest of Australia.

Richard Flanagan

#20. Love or not, I wouldn't subject a wife to the road. It's punishment.

Billy Strayhorn

#21. [Billy Strayhorn] understood the violin as well as he understood Jazz, and he wrote for the violin as a violin.

Stephane Grappelli

#22. You need not be proud of me ... I'm only being active till you can be again
it isn't such a great desire on my part to serve theworld and I'll fall back into habits of sloth quite easily!

Eleanor Roosevelt

#23. Though your experience may indicate that God has forgotten you or has left you alone, He is on your side. He is the God of grace, and He is actively working on your behalf.

John Townsend

#24. It really was truth or consequences, and Billy went with truth. It was just incredible." Forsaking public prominence, Strayhorn found personal freedom in service to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Now there might not be a Billy Strayhorn Orchestra. But there was a Billy Strayhorn.

David Hajdu

#25. Romance is mush, stifling those who strive.

Billy Strayhorn

#26. A Train was born without any effort - if was like writing a letter to a friend.

Billy Strayhorn

#27. My grandmother played the piano, and I used to toddle over there and pick out little things that sounded good to me.

Billy Strayhorn

#28. I think everything should happen at halfway to dawn. That's when all the heads of government should meet. I think everybody would fall in love.

Billy Strayhorn

#29. I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets ...

George Washington Carver