Creativity Quote by Duke Ellington

Ellington draws a clean line between two feelings people love to blur, and he does it with a bandleader's sense of arrangement. "Love" is the big, sustaining chord - "supreme and unconditional" implies a commitment that holds even when the melody goes sour. "Like", by contrast, is the pleasant groove: enjoyable, social, and contingent on the beat staying agreeable. The phrasing is deceptively simple, almost conversational, but the hierarchy is ruthless. He isn't romanticizing affection; he's ranking it, insisting that some bonds are built to survive dissonance and some are built to evaporate at the first wrong note.

The subtext feels especially pointed coming from a musician whose career depended on taste, trend, and fickle audiences. Ellington lived in a world where being "liked" could be lucrative and still precarious. Nightly applause doesn't equal loyalty; critics pivot, crowds move on, markets shift. His statement reads like hard-earned clarity from someone who watched admiration come and go while deeper commitments - to craft, to collaborators, to a musical identity - had to be sturdier than public approval.

There's also a quiet rebuke to politeness-as-ethics. "Nice but limited" frames likeability as a social currency, not a moral achievement. Ellington, a master of elegance and control, slips in a blunt truth: civility is fine; it isn't salvation. Love, in his formulation, is the thing that keeps playing after the room changes.