The 76-year-old Mexican-born songwriter and performer Carlos Santana is known today as one of the best electric guitar players who ever lived. Santana, who came up in the Bay Area in the ’60s and made a major name for himself at Woodstock in 1969, has enjoyed many career highs.
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From songs like “Black Magic Woman” to “Smooth” with Rob Thomas, Santana has proven to be a resilient artist. His music continues to captivate and wow audiences (even if sometimes he gets himself into hot water).
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With all that life, music, and experience to his name, one might wonder what Santana has to say about his craft, music, his life, and more. These are the best 20 Carlos Santana quotes.
1. “If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal any moment.”
2. “Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims.”
3. “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.”
4. “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.”
5. “My job in this life is to give people spiritual ecstasy through music. In my concerts people cry, laugh, dance. If they climaxed spiritually, I did my job. I did it decently and honestly.”
6. “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.”
7. “The music of Hendrix wakes people up to their possibilities. It’s more than just dreaming about being a guitar hero.”
8. “The more choices we give patients affected by depression, the better we will serve them.”
9. “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.”
10. “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.”
11. “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.”
12. “The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace.”
13. “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!”
14. “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.”
15. “I knuckle down with my demons, and with my weaknesses.”
16. “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.”
17. “Some songs are just like tattoos for your brain… you hear them and they’re affixed to you.”
18. “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.”
19. “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.”
20. “Everybody sooner or later has to drop the luggage and the baggage of illusions.”
Photo by Roberto Finizio/Jensen Communications
Calling all fans! Santana Counting Crows Tour 2024 is here. Don’t miss your chance – get your tickets today!
