“Some songs are just like tattoos for your brain… you hear them and they’re affixed to you.”

The music of Hendrix wakes people up to their possibilities. It’s more than just dreaming about being a guitar hero.

I have been accused of being a very simplistic, very lyrical player, and that’s okay. That just comes from the blues, which is my background. But every day you wake up and transcend. You can’t ever rest on your laurels.

Whether you are doing it in the bar, the church, the strip joint, or the Himalayas, the first duty of music is to complement and enhance life.

No one’s better than me. I’m not better than anyone. Whether it’s Eric Clapton or BB King we look straight at each other. And that keeps it real.

Peace has never come from dropping bombs. Real peace comes from enlightenment and educating people to behave more in a divine manner.

The people of Arizona, the people of Atlanta, Georgia, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

When a baby comes you can smell two things: the smell of flesh, which smells like chicken soup, and the smell of lilies, the flower of another garden, the spiritual garden.

People are flowers. Music is water. Musicians are the hose.

The concept is to weave in some emotion.

Surrender your whole being to a note, and gravity disappears with one chord.

If you stay in your heart you will always be inspired and if you are inspired you will always be enthusiastic. There is nothing more contagious on this planet as enthusiasm.

The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace.

The worst thing you can become in life is cynical. Cynical is like concrete. and nothing grows in concrete.

You meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you’ve been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: ‘Write this down’

Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.

The guitar is your first wings. It’s assigned and designed to unfold your vision and imagination.

The first virtue of a young man today – that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers – is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.

My eye, my brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images since it is one image among others?

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.

I took my grandmother to the emergency room. The doctor said that she was on an artificial life support system, and that although her brain was dead her heart was still beating. I though, “we’ve never had a democrat in the family before”.

The truth is that brains have little to do with either the making or accumulating of money.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.

A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.