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

I am becoming the people I love.

I don’t eat meat because meat brings out negative qualities such as fear, anger, anxiety, aggressiveness, etc. Vegetables peacefully offer themselves to the earth when ripe, thus allowing a sublime and peaceful thought-consciousness.

Some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that.

Blues was my first love. It was the first thing where I said, ‘Oh man, this is the stuff.’ It just sounded so raw and honest, gut-bucket honest. From then I started rebelling.

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.

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.

The more we define ourselves in relation to the people around us, the more lost we are.

You add value to people when you value them.

If there were a being in the world whose eyes could look into other people’s hearts, very few men or women would be able to face up to it.

We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.

I will always choose to work in a movie based on whether I would want to watch it – if I would be willing to spend money in a theatre on it. The script and the people you will work with come after that.

Even stupid people have a role to play in your life. They make you wiser and more patient.

There are some people you’ve just got to love from a distance.

We say things to ourselves that we would never say to people we love