Top 129 Quotes & Sayings by Nina Simone
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Nina Simone.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
I'm a real rebel with a cause.
I think that the artists who don't get involved in preaching messages probably are happier - but you see, I have to live with Nina, and that is very difficult.
Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.
I didn't get interested in music. It was a gift from God.
The worst thing about that kind of prejudice... is that while you feel hurt and angry and all the rest of it, it feeds you self-doubt. You start thinking, perhaps I am not good enough.
I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.
I wasn't a jazz player, but a classical musician, and I improvised arrangements of popular songs using classical motifs.
I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.
I don't like rap music at all. I don't think it's music. It's just a beat and rapping.
You feel the shame, humiliation, and anger at being just another victim of prejudice, and at the same time, there's the nagging worry that maybe... you're just no good.
I'll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear. I mean really, no fear!
I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about... Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.
It's an artist's duty to reflect the times in which we live.
When I'm on that stage, I assume honor. I assume compensation, and I should.
This may be a dream, but I'll say it anyway: I was supposed to be married last year, and I bought a gown. When I meet Nelson Mandela, I shall put on this gown and have the train of it removed and put aside, and kiss the ground that he walks on and then kiss his feet.
There's no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.
My daughter is in more competition with me. I never wanted to be bigger than my mother or to challenge her.
All the time, there was the weight of my community's expectations on my shoulders.
At this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved.
I want to shake people up so bad, that when they leave a nightclub where I've performed, I just want them to be to pieces.
To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world. Black people. And I mean that in every sense.
Did you know that the human voice is the only pure instrument? That it has notes no other instrument has? It's like being between the keys of a piano. The notes are there, you can sing them, but they can't be found on any instrument. That's like me. I live in between this. I live in both worlds, the black and white world.
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.
I flirt all the time. I like men! I don't think we can do without them.
The protest years were over, not just for me but for a whole generation, and in music, just like in politics, many of the greatest talents were dead or in exile, and their place was filled by third-rate imitators.
Desegregation is a joke.
I would like a man now who is rich, and who can give me a boat - a sailboat. I want to own it and let him pay for it. My first love is the sea and water, not music. Music is second.
I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I'm not going.
From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.
I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: 'You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.
When I was studying... there weren't any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.
You get racism crossing the street; it's in the very fabric of American society.
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
As a political weapon, it has helped me for 30 years defend the rights of American blacks and third-world people all over the world, to defend them with protest songs. To move the audience to make them conscious of what has been done to my people around the world.
I'm not a blues singer, I'm a diva.
Sometimes I sound like gravel, and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.
I try to swim every damn day I can, and I've learned to scuba dive and snorkel.
Greed has driven the world crazy. And I think I'm lucky that I have a place over here that I can call home.
What I was interested in was conveying an emotional message, which means using everything you've got inside you sometimes to barely make a note, or if you have to strain to sing, you sing.
My love is like the wind and wild is the wind. Give me more than one caress, satisfy my hungriness. Let the wind blow through your heart for wild is the wind.
We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares question it. This is what is wrong, symbolically, with America.
You can't help it. An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times.
Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking.
It's a new dawn, it's a new day...and I'm feeling good.
To be young, gifted and black!
How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it
This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.
Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.
You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.
I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.
I know I'm different, but I don't think about it.
You don't have to live next to me / Just give me my equality.
I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live, as I've dreamed.
What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.
Anything human can be felt through music, which means that there is no limit to the creating that can be done with music. You can take the same phrase from any song and cut it up so many different ways - it's infinite. It's like God... you know?
Birds flying high you know how I feel
Sun in the sky you know how I feel
Breeze driftin' on by you know how I feel
And this old world is a new world
And a bold world
For me
And I'm feeling good
I'm feeling good
Music is an art and art has its own rules. And one of them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world, if you are going to be true to yourself. And if you don't do it - and you are an artist - it punishes you.
You've got to learn to leave the table When love's no longer being served".
Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.
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