“You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music.”

Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.

What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you’re not getting the whole thing that’s there to be had.

Everything is traditionally slow – much faster than it ever has been on earth but still far, far too slow.

There’s a lot there to enlarge you. That’s part of the value of being in an extended family is that it enlarges you. It makes you bigger. It makes you more.

And as far as I’m concerned, it’s like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.

I’ll try any guitar just to see if it’s different in an effort to see if it will lead me anywhere.

I don’t know why, it’s the same reason why you like some music and you don’t like others. There’s something about it that you like. Ultimately I don’t find it’s in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it’s fundamentally emotional.

Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you’ll always win!

You can’t repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.

The Grateful Dead plays at religious services essentially.

Music is a universal language insofar as you don’t need to know anything else about a musician that you are playing with other than that they can play music.

Too much of a good thing is just about right

And when you don’t have to talk to the person next to you, that’s real clean. Takes a certain thing not to try to keep anything up, not to have to entertain one another.

I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I’m more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

How many Beethovens are there that just for lack of the training, the world doesn’t get exposed to.

What’s been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.

Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life.

My faith was tested like Job. That’s the message I try to tell other people: just because you believe in God, serve God, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, people gotta realize, it don’t mean things not gonna happen to you.

I equate Deadheads to people that like black licorice. There aren’t many people that like black licorice, but the ones that do, REALLY REALLY like it! Or buttermilk, or whatever.

I’m not the same man I used to be, I’m not out hell-raising, stuff like that. I am a changed man.

I like all the kinds of music I’ve been into. I’m certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff.

The fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top.

If you value a man’s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper – and despise it.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.