Jerry Garcia Quotes

We are not completely autonomous.

Every silver lining has a touch of grey.

And the live show is still our main thing.

Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.

Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you've been to some of those places, you think, 'How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?'

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.

And Warner Bros. seems to be pretty much into re-releasing all of their catalog. So there's the Warner Bros. stuff and the stuff that we have control over, we're gradually re-releasing it. Some stuff we don't have control over.

We've been trying to sell out for years, nobody's buying!

The pursuit of happiness is such a large of concept.

You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.

The world has to tell us. In other words, we don't have an agenda or a battle plan or a map or a direction or anything. We're just going along, and our world is telling us.

I'm not trying to clock scores in this lifetime, it's just that things are better now than they were like five, ten years ago. Music has gotten a lot better. There's a lot of people who are committed to - soulfully.

America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.

In my own musical existence I don't feel that being a guitar player is like the best thing on earth to be. I would rather be a balanced musician. Playing in a group, I'm tending to think more about the music and less about the guitar. That's just me getting older. I'm not interested in being a virtuoso guitar player or anything like that.

We're not uncomfortable with it, and we've already been through enough of the music business where I'm not really worried that commercial success is going to in some way - we're already past saving, you know what I mean? It's too late for us.

We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.

You can't make rules regarding the moral behavior of something unless you know what the hell it is, and what it's capacities are. What it can do, what it can't do.

In the last 100 years since the invention of sound reproduction, music has really taken off and it is much more a common language because of records and transportation.

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.

It's not enough to be the best at what you do. You must be perceived as the only one who does what you do.

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.

Music goes way back before language does. And music is like the key to a whole spiritual existence which this society doesn't even talk about. We know it's there. The Grateful Dead plays at religious services essentially. We play at the religious services of the new age. Everybody gets high, and that's what it's all about really. Getting high is a lot more real than listening to a politician. You can think that getting high actually did happen - that you danced, and got sweaty, and carried on. It really did happen. I know when it happens. I know it when it happens every time.

At some point or another, our boundaries run into the boundaries of the exterior reality. Like we run into laws and other things that we don't own or don't have control over.

Yeah, I think we have to. If we want our shows to be - if we want the quality of the shows to be good, and we want the energy to be high, and if we want to be in good enough physical shape to do them, and not exhaust ourselves on the road, and not get stale, we have to pace.

The pursuit of happiness is an overview kind of thing. It's not in the Bill of Rights.

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

American society has gone completely into denial.

Light shows are sort of a meditative kind of experience, you know. It is not like a shock.

The sun will shine in my back door one day.

If you can create a reality that is entirely fictitious, it doesn't owe anything to this stuff out here, but you interact with it on your own terms. I mean, if you took it to the point where finally you get, say, tactile feedback, so you were wired in in terms of the whole nervous system. The sensorium. You would have the ultimate art form. I mean, any painter would want it, any filmmaker would want access to it you know, any musician would want access to it. It would eliminate the need for the divisions between what we describe as the arts, converting the whole thing to experience.

I don't feel that one instrument has more weight than others. Any sound that you can produce adds to your vocabulary of possibilities.

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

The point is there is more information now then you can pass along comfortably in an oral tradition, say a strictly speaking culture. That is a problem.

every mind is at least as heavy as mine

There is some art that says the same thing to everybody. WE need something like that. What that is, I don't know. But virtual reality may be the key to it.

We are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it OK to drink, but it's not OK to take drugs? Blah, blah, blah. What's a crime? What's criminality? What can you do, what can't you do, and so forth. All these things are really confusing. A lot of it is really contradictory; it doesn't really make sense.

I think part of what has to happen, somewhere, pretty soon, is that a human template has to come up. We have to start with, OK let's throw out all this other stuff, everything we have thought about it before, throw out all our models, and start with a human. What is a human?

So it's one of those things where we have to - our problem is pacing ourselves and still reaching a large enough number of our audience. Because we don't want to burn the audience. And we don't want to be excluding anybody.

I Don't Think There's A Good Excuse For Being Unhappy. I'm Not Particularly Unhappy, But I Know What Pain Is. I think That Life Is Characterized By Pain, Partly. Part Of The Way You Can Tell You're Alive Is By How Much Pain You're Experiencing, Or How Little.

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

There is no dogma, there isn't anything about how the universe works.

The great thing is the thing of being able to see things through many points of view. That's enlarging. I mean, it saves you from ultimately from the boredom of having one point of view, like being locked in a room with nothing but your own point of view, your own references.

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. It doesn't matter what their music is, you can find something that you can play together, with what their culture is. The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.

The satisfaction of producing a work of art is the thing of getting off on it on some level.

If you are picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking Evil.

The thing of being able to share somebody's reality, which has so far been a matter of what communication is about, you know. Now it has gotten a whole new leg. It has gotten a thing of being able to actually step in somebody's reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do, specifically. The implications, to me, are immense. I mean, how far can it go? If you go into a complete, like a cyberspace model of some type, in which... you know the discussion about the mind and the interaction between the mind and the universe as a holographic phenomenon.

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

It's a joke. Greed and the desire to take drugs are two separate things. If you want to separate the two, the thing you do is make drugs legal. Accept the reality that people do want to change their consciousness, and make an effort to make safer, healthier drugs.