Quotes By Carlos Santana

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

The Devil is like a strainer that separates the mud from the gold.

When you fly to New York, sometimes they put you on hold and you just go round and around in a holding pattern. Sometimes in a concert, I feel other spirits in a holding pattern that they want to land through my heart and through my fingers.

I have come to the conclusion - and I don't know why it took me so long, but nevertheless, I'm here now - that a lot of people tell me they don't get enough guitar on my albums. So I decided to do an album where the guitar would be the singer, playing the melody.

The best part of touring, still, is touching people's hearts and igniting my band and igniting the people into what you call a spiritual revelation is sound and emotion.

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

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

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!

I'm laughing because I know the secret of life. And the secret of life is that I have validated my existence. I know that I am worth more than my house, my bank account, or any physical thing.

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.

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.

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

The more choices we give patients affected by depression, the better we will serve them.

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.

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

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.

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.

There's a melody in everything. And once you find the melody, then you connect immediately with the heart. Because sometimes English or Spanish, Swahili or any language gets in the way. But nothing penetrates the heart faster than the melody.

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

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

Your wrinkles either show that you're nasty, cranky, and senile, or that you're always smiling.

A lot of people said to me, 'Enough with the guest vocalists for a while. We want to hear the Mexican play the guitar!'

Some songs are just like tattoos for your brain... you hear them and they're affixed to you.

I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It's not like I'm cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.

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 know I'm not the kind of person who's gonna wind up a walking jukebox, like many rock 'n' roll artists. They just play their hits and that's it. That doesn't appeal to me.

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

Just as we have two eyes and two feet, duality is part of life.

Stay in your heart.