Carlos Santana Quotes

Live up to your convictions. You walk in grace or you walk in fear. You can't have it both ways.

We are capable of creating miracles ourselves and the greatest miracle is to create a masterpiece of joy out of your life with no excuses. The thing I focus on is going straight to heart. I go to mine first because if I don't feel it, you're not going to feel it. I take a deep breath and remind myself that before I give it to you I have to give it to myself.

When you are in your heart of hearts, you can see beyond appearances.

The concept is to weave in some emotion.

Your mind is a magnet. You don't attract what you need or what you want; you attract who you are. And I love who I am!

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.

Angels cry because they want to experience what you and I feel: the moment. They live in eternity. They dont know what it is like to read a newspaper and get ink on your fingers. They dont know what it is like to take your shoes off and wiggle your toes under the dinner table.

I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.

First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.

You can take things that Jimi Hendrix took, from Curtis Mayfield or from Buddy Guy for example, because we are all children of everything, even Picasso. But if you want to stand out, you have to learn to crystallize your existence and create your own fingerprints.

If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal any moment.

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

I realized that it's all really one, that John Lennon was correct. We utilize the music to bring down the walls of Berlin, to bring up the force of compassion and forgiveness and kindness between Palestines, Hebrews. Bring down the walls here in San Diego, Tijuana, Cuba.

There is nothing more contagious on this planet than enthusiasm.

If You're going to sweep the floor, sweep it better than anybody in town. And if You're going to play the guitar, really, really, really get in it, and don't be jivin'.

My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.

If our history can challenge the next wave of musicians to keep moving and changing, to keep spiritually hungry and horny, that's what it's all about.

I am here to give voice to the invisible.

Bring the brothers home, and sisters home now. Legalize marijuana and take all that money and invest it in teachers and in education. You will see a transformation in America.

There is no person that love cannot heal; there is no soul that love cannot save.

KISS is Las Vegas entertainment. A musician doesn't need the mask.

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-conscio usness

I knuckle down with my demons, and with my weaknesses.

Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.

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

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.

Everybody sooner or later has to drop the luggage and the baggage of illusions.

There's never one sunrise the same or one sunset the same.

My reality is that God speaks to you every day. There's an inner voice, and when you hear it, you get a little tingle in your medulla oblongata at the back of your neck, a little shiver, and at two o'clock in the morning, everything's really quiet and 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. It is just an inner voice, and you trust it. That voice will never take you to the desert.

You are not realistic unless you believe in miracles!

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.

Every day you wake up is an opportunity to go beyond, and that 's why I let my band go right now. For the first time in my life I'm just roaming around, vagabonding.