If you’re an aspiring guitarist, or a sucker for rock ‘n’ roll, this is the perfect collection of 210 Jerry Garcia quotes for you.
Jerome John Garcia, most commonly known as Jerry Garcia, was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
Being the lead vocalist, principal songwriter, and lead guitarist of the rock band the Grateful Dead, he and his bandmates dominated the world of rock in the 1960s. His energy and enthusiasm on-stage became his charm that people really loved.
So get ready to rock and roll, because we’re about to take you on a ride to the world of Jerry Garcia.
His words will surely inspire, enlighten, and open your mind to a new level of consciousness.
Check them out below.
And make sure to read these guitar quotes.
Best Jerry Garcia Quotes
1. “Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”
2. “You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna know.”
3. “You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best, you want to be considered the only one who does what you do.”
4. “Whistle through your teeth and spit, ‘cause it’s alright.”
5. “Every silver lining has a touch of gray.”
6. “Magic is what we do. Music is how we do it.”
7. “Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.”
8. “The sun will shine in my back door one day.”
9. “Every mind is at least as heavy as mine.”
10. “If the thunder don’t get ya, then the lightning will.”
11. “Too much of a good thing is just about right.”
12. “How many Beethovens are there that just for lack of the training, the world doesn’t get exposed to.”
13. “All I know is, if you listen to society, you’ll never get anywhere!”
14. “It’s fun for us—that’s the important thing.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes About Being a Musician
15. “Listening—that’s what music is about. You hear it. And I’d listen to it, and something would move me one way or another, and I would try and play it.”
16. “I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven’t heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum, and Coltrane, and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.”
17. “You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians about sequences, and notes, and about scales, and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.”
18. “I’m not Beethoven!”
19. “With the recognition, comes additional responsibility, because then we’re no longer a one-shot. We’re now part of the environment.”
20. “As a musician, you fall into certain patterns that you’re not conscious of unless you start listening to yourself on tape a lot. If you do that, you start recognizing habits—then you have to try and break them.”
21. “Most musicians, regardless of what culture they come from, can get together and agree on some stuff about music. As there is going to be a common ground.”
22. “I don’t feel that one instrument has more weight than others. Any sound that you can produce adds to your vocabulary of possibilities.”
23. “We play in the moment. We’re not performers, we can’t manufacture intensity. We’re not technicians in our performing sets, we’re musicians.”
24. “I like all the kinds of music I’ve been into. I’m certainly not a purist, in that I will only play country licks in a country song, or blues licks in blues stuff. The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that’s their business.”
25. “In reality, everybody has got musical thoughts. If you are able to overcome the part of it which is muscle training—which is what most musical playing actually is, performance actually is, is muscle training, and you are able to convert your ideas directly into music—you’re a musician too.”
26. “I recognize that as a musician, there is a certain chauvinism attached to it, which is the thing of, ‘I spent my time learning how to play. You didn’t spend time learning how to play, therefore, you are not a musician.’”
27. “When people get to play together for a long time, that’s when the music gets good.”
28. “The musicians who live around San Francisco live there because it is groovy to live there.”
29. “Everybody has the capacity to really surprise me musically.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes About the Music Industry
30. “Now there is no place you can go where you don’t hear certain types of music.”
31. “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.”
32. “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.”
33. “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.”
34. “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.”
35. “It’s much too late to do anything about rock and roll now.”
36. “You need music, I don’t know why. It’s probably one of those Joe Campbell questions—why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration, and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.”
37. “You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly—radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.”
38. “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.”
39. “In folk music, I’ve always been fond of the fragment—the song that has one verse. And you don’t know anything about the characters, you don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re doing something important. I love that. I’m really a sucker for that kind of song.”
40. “If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.”
41. “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.”
42. “I think that the revolution in music is over, and what’s left is a mop-up action. It’s a matter of the news getting out to everybody else. I think that the important changes have already happened—changes in consciousness. It’s mostly a matter of everything else catching up to that. Everything is traditionally slow—much faster than it ever has been on earth, but still far, far too slow.”
43. “Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.”
44. “Western ears have a hard time hearing anything that isn’t in four-four time. A lot of cultures experience music in five-eight, for example, five-four.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes About Songwriting and His Guitar
45. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually written from inspiration, actually had a song just go, ‘Bing!’ I only recall that happening to me twice—once was with ‘Terrapin,’ and the other was ‘Wharf Rat.’ I mean, that’s twice in a lifetime of writing!”
46. “The process of selecting the tone on the guitar is an aesthetic process like any other, so you try a lot of different things.”
47. “My guitar is a mutation between a classic Fender Stratocaster guitar, which I played for years, and a Gibson solid-body like an SG or a Les Paul. It contains all sounds of the basic classic rock n’ roll guitars. It does what I want it to do.”
48. “For me, I think, the only danger is being too much in love with guitar playing. The music is the most important thing, and the guitar is only the instrument.”
49. “I have one custom guitar which I play almost exclusively. I have others—sometimes, you want a little texture, kind of a different sound or something.”
50. “I don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘Jeez, I feel great today. I think I’ll write a song.’ I mean, anything is more interesting to me than writing a song. It’s like, ‘I think I’d like to write a song. No, I guess I better go feed the cat first.’ You know what I mean? It’s like pulling teeth. I don’t enjoy it a bit.”
51. “I mean, just because you’re a musician doesn’t mean all your ideas are about music. So, every once in a while, I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.”
52. “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.”
53. “I’ll try any guitar just to see if it’s different, in an effort to see if it will lead me anywhere. I’m trying to have a guitar built. What’s needed is better instruments, better amplifiers, better hardware for electric music to get better.”
54. “The satisfaction of producing a work of art is the thing of getting off on it on some level.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes About his Band
55. “The Grateful Dead is really a collection of friends—people who were around at the time.”
56. “We’re like licorice—not everybody likes licorice. But the people who like licorice really like licorice.”
57. “I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.”
58. “We didn’t invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead. We were just in line to see what was going to happen.”
59. “Grateful Dead—that’s it! Nobody in the band liked it. I didn’t like it either. But it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name, and everyone else said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It’s just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don’t like it.”
60. “We’re sort of, like, the town whore that’s finally become an institution. We’re finally becoming respectable.”
61. “The whole thing is remembering, ‘This is who we are.’ Remember who we are? We are, in reality, a group of misfits—crazy people who have voluntarily come together to work this stuff out, and do the best we can, and try to be as fair as we possibly can with each other, and just struggle through life.”
62. “We are the Don Quixotes of rock ‘n’ roll—we’re doing something nobody cares to do.”
63. “Everybody has very, very different concepts. The Grateful Dead has a lot of friction and a lot of tension in the music.”
64. “Most of what The Grateful Dead does is like, happening now—it’s very little rehearsed.”
65. “A part of The Grateful Dead sensibility is we think of some songs as tremendously commercial.”
66. “The Grateful Dead schedule is not so demanding that it requires our total at all times.”
67. “What we are recording is the whole event is not just the music—the whole experience.”
68. “The Grateful Dead concerts certainly have the kind of depth, and have the capacity to be uplifting—it can be spiritual in nature.”
69. “We’ve been trying to sell out for years, nobody’s buying!”
Jerry Garcia Quotes About Performing
70. “Typically, we played six nights a week, five sets a night.”
71. “It really improves our performances on every level, the best possible combination of performance, venue, and recording studio.”
72. “Working in the studio is like building a ship in a bottle. Playing live is like having a row boat on the oceans.”
73. “We rehearse to the point of knowing the tune—just the structure of the melody.”
74. “So we are pretty convinced we don’t want to play huge stadiums unless we can play them well.”
75. “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.”
76. “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.”
77. “And there’s a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents—I mean, it’s gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say this is the demographics of our audience.”
78. “But audio is a component of video, so there’s always been that anyway, and although we’ve never expressed a visual side apart from the Grateful Dead movie, I don’t find it that remote. You know what I mean? It’s a departure of sorts, but it’s like a first cousin.”
79. “Our strong suit is what we do, and our audience.”
80. “And the live show is still our main thing.”
81. “Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand. Anyone who sweats like that must be all right.”
82. “We have quite a large area, and that makes it more fun for us, certainly more satisfying, because it doesn’t restrict us to one particular idea or one particular style. The result, I think, is pretty interesting. We don’t expect to make a fortune at it, or ever be popular, or famous, or worshipped, or hit The Ed Sullivan Show, or the circuses, or the big top.”
83. “See, there’s only two theaters, man, that are set up pretty groovy—all around for music and for smooth stage changes, good lighting, and all that—the Fillmore and the Capitol Theatre. And those are the only two in the whole country.”
84. “Why is it okay for people to tape the shows? Because even so, there’s no way you can bottle up the experience. You can take the notes home, but that experience is one you have to be there.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes on Life
85. “Stuff that’s hidden, and murky, and ambiguous is scary because you don’t know what it does.”
86. “But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by. You know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, ’cause you’re not going to get it from what’s around you. And society isn’t going to give it to you.”
87. “Sometimes, the light’s all shining on me, other times, I can barely see.”
88. “Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going some place else.”
89. “Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.”
90. “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
91. “The nature of what we’re doing is something, which is by its very nature, non-formulaic. There’s no way that you can make it happen by intention alone. It’s something that you have to sort of allow it to happen, and you have to allow for it to happen.”
92. “Each person makes their own decision about what it is that is happening, whether they like it or don’t like it, whether they want to lend their energy to it, or not, or what, you know.”
93. “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.”
94. “Some things may work, but they definitely won’t work every time. Some things may work at various times.”
95. “People may need something to celebrate. They need a context in which to celebrate things. They need something that fills the void that’s left by the bankruptcy of religion, and so forth.”
96. “In this universe, the top end is light, and the bottom end is real hard stuff.”
97. “If something doesn’t work, it becomes obvious immediately. This just isn’t going to work.”
98. “The only way things work around here is if everybody wants it to work. If everybody wants it to work, then it has a prayer. Even then, there’s no guarantee. But at least it has a prayer.”
99. “We do things because we enjoy it.”
Psychological Jerry Garcia Quotes
100. “Things come up from the outside. The outside world says, ‘Okay, you have to do this, you have to go here, and here, and here, and these are your options. You can be here, or you can be here. You can do this, or you can do this. You can go here, or you can go there.’ So each one of those things becomes a place of decision, and the way we make decisions is that we all get together, and if somebody doesn’t feel right about it or it doesn’t seem to sit right, usually we’ll go with the no vote. If somebody’s not comfortable with it, we’ll figure it’s not going to be worth doing.”
101. “Kerouac was a breeze—some kind of incredible super-American, Mythos personality blasting through the highways of 1947 America.”
102. “We have cultural depth. We get all kinds of stuff to chew on, to live on.”
103. “That’s part of that thing of transcending languages—every person will have their own language.”
104. “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.”
105. “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 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.”
106. “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.”
107. “It’s odd that there is a high level of appreciation of nature. There is the aesthetic side that really loves nature and beauty.”
108. “I have always had this basic biological question in terms of evolution—if the drive to evolution is to like, survive. An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.”
109. “I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I’m more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.”
Existential Jerry Garcia Quotes
110. “There is no dogma—there isn’t anything about how the universe works.”
111. “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, ‘Okay 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?’”
112. “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.”
113. “The reality which is pretending to be reality right now, impersonating reality, is just a pretty flimsy structure. There is not a lot of substance to it. You can’t find people who are actively involved or affected by it. What you see is a completely different world. What you see is the world of the homeless, and so forth.”
114. “What’s been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.”
115. “It’s pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.”
116. “What we need is something—a definition of a human, starting from the ground up—so that the suitable moral structure that goes around it makes sense. The context has to come from the human first, rather than bits and pieces of fragments of old religion and all of the old moral superstructure, whatever it used to be.”
117. “You can’t repeat things, because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.”
118. “The world where you can go walk outside and walk around the block—that’s reality. The reality that’s being talked about is something else entirely.”
119. “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.”
120. “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 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.”
121. “I think the Muslim religious is a little too tight—it doesn’t fit humans. Humans can’t possibly fit into it, so there are a lot of really unhappy people, terribly repressed. It is a religion that works against you, because the template don’t fit. It’s not human, you know.”
122. “There are any number of things that survive great, and don’t need any kind of consciousness. So why bother going through all the trouble of evolving monkeys that don’t run very well, or climb very fast, or have particularly sharp teeth, but have big heads.”
123. “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.”
124. “The information is there, you may not perceive it, but it does affect the lower orders. There are places where it just peaks out. It is like the color spectrum, it just simply goes beyond where you can perceive it any more, but it is still going on. If you decide that the invisible continuation of the color spectrum is important to your sense of what reality is about, then you would want to extend it. Extend it as far as you could, as an aesthetic.”
Motivational Jerry Garcia Quotes
125. “There is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night, and if you go, no one may follow. That path is for your steps alone.”
126. “If you’re able to enjoy something, to devote your life to it, or a reasonable amount of time and energy, it will work out for you.”
127. “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.”
128. “Nothing left to do but smile.”
129. “Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you’ll always win! Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!”
130. “Done time in the lock-up, done time on the streets, done time on the upswing, and time in defeat. I know what I’m askin’. I know it’s a lot, just to say that I love you, believe it or not.”
131. “Once in a while, you get shown the light in the strangest of places, if you look it right.”
132. “If you assume you haven’t learned anything yet, there’s no reason your playing can’t stay dynamic all your life.”
133. “To me, that’s the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That’s the basic, ultimate freedom.”
134. “Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives.”
135. “There’s a lot there to enlarge you. That’s part of the value of being in an extended family is that it enlarges you—it makes you bigger, it makes you more.”
136. “The pursuit of happiness is an overview kind of thing—it’s not in the Bill of Rights.”
137. “Sometimes, you have to be clever.”
138. “The only way to work this out is the long slow way—unpanicked, unhurried.”
139. “As long as we can play, we’ll play, regardless of what it’s for, who it’s for, or anything.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes and Personal Views
140. “My kids seem to be more mature and older than I am now, somehow. They’ve gotten ahead of me, somehow, but they’re very patient with me.”
141. “I sat down to my supper, t’was a bottle of red whiskey.”
142. “I’ve opted for fun in this lifetime.”
143. “In my world, everything is legal.”
144. “My life isn’t like those kind of people who are middle media celebrities.”
145. “I have all the patience in the world about Sirens. For me, it’s not a Grateful Dead project, it’s a Me project.”
146. “I’m shopping around for something to do that no one will like.”
147. “I don’t think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut’s books, mostly, I don’t feel are movie material.”
148. “And for me, there’s still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.”
149. “As a musician, my preference is to play live for people. That’s my orientation.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes and Political Views
150. “If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society righteously.”
151. “These are bush elections—dull, and unpleasant by, and large. Doors are closing everywhere, and the opportunity to do something adventurous and fun has gotten narrower and narrower.”
152. “What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place.”
153. “For me, the lame part of the ‘60s was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.”
154. “America is still mostly xenophobic and racist—that’s the nature of America, I think.”
155. “What we’re thinking about is a peaceful planet. We’re not thinking about anything else. We’re not thinking about any kind of power. We’re not thinking about any kind of struggles. We’re not thinking about revolution, or war, or any of that. That’s not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life—a simple life, a good life. And think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.”
156. “The bigger issue was the whole takeover of the food industry by big corporations.”
157. “We’re involved in a society which is undergoing some really weird changes now.”
158. “Right now, America is under the gun—it’s being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.”
159. “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.”
160. “I think that America is in danger of losing its adventurous spirit in the cause of some kind of illusion of safety, or substitute of law and order there.”
161. “American society has gone completely into denial.”
162. “We are experiencing a real confusion here in the United States, you know. Why is it okay 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.”
163. “We are not completely autonomous.”
164. “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.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes About Death and Drugs
165. “And as far as I’m concerned, it’s like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.”
166. “We were very fortunate to have a little time in history when LSD was still legal, and we’re able to experiment with drugs, just like we were doing with music.”
167. “To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution—a conscious tool of the universe.”
168. “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?’”
169. “The real problems are cultural—the problems of the people who take drugs as a cultural trap. I think there’s a real problem there—the crack stuff, the hopelessness of the junkie, the urban angst.”
170. “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.”
171. “Where does it say in the scriptures you can’t get high or raise your consciousness?”
172. “I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.”
173. “Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.”
174. “I think it’s too bad that everybody’s decided to turn on drugs. I don’t think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem, cops are the problem, money’s the problem, but drugs are just drugs.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes About Technology
175. “Technology didn’t just go clunk. It was this early disease, starting with a plow, I guess, or something like that, the first tool that made it so you could do more things—the first domesticated animal, or the first wheel.”
176. “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.”
177. “If you are going to develop beast technology, you want to start by having cage technology. You want to make the rules first, you know.”
178. “This virtual reality stuff is the technological equivalent, really, of psychedelics.”
179. “Light shows are sort of a meditative kind of experience, you know. It is not like a shock.”
180. “One of the things that’s attractive about cyberspace is that it can be construed as no threat. If you see it through the video game keyhole, the amusement keyhole, the entertainment keyhole, it is no threat. If you see it through the LSD keyhole, the consciousness-expanding keyhole, it’s like electronic drugs—it is a threat.”
181. “The performances in the future would be like an audience wired to somebody who was sort of instigating, and then moment-to-moment creation would be transmuted individually.”
182. “I am not a keyboard person. The mouse is better.”
183. “You reach into cyberspace and you grab some cyber stuff, build it up, and the computer will give you a 360 of it.”
184. “What we do is play for people, we don’t play so good for machines.”
Jerry Garcia Quotes and Song Lyrics
185. “Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.”
186. “I’m goin’ where the wind don’t blow so strange—maybe off on some high cold mountain chain.”
187. “Hang me, oh, hang me, so I’ll be dead and gone. I wouldn’t mind hanging, boys, but you wait in jail so long.”
188. “Seems like everything led up to this day, and it’s just like every day that’s ever been—sun goin’ up, and then the sun, it goin’ down.”
189. “Lady finger, dipped in moonlight, writing what for across the morning sky.”
190. “A box of rain will ease the pain, and love will see you through.”
191. “I don’t know, don’t really care, let there be songs to fill the air.”
192. “So I’ll dance, and we will sing, for it doesn’t mean a thing to remember that the only time is now.”
193. “Standing on the moon with nothing left to do, lovely view of heaven, but I’d rather be with you.”
194. “It’s the same story the crow told me, it’s the only one he knows. Like the morning sun you come, and like the wind you go.”
195. “Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills, one man gathers what another man spills.”
196. “Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart.”
197. “Oh well, a touch of gray kind of suits you anyway.”
198. “The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.”
199. “I will get by. I will survive.”
Other Jerry Garcia Quotes
200. “I could have made the film a lot more disturbing than it is, but my whole point was to inspire people to take action.”
201. “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.”
202. “Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.”
203. “You need to have many points of reference—many places to touch down and make contact with.”
204. “The Japanese are hard to figure out.”
205. “Seeing sound, the high order stuff that’s not audible still affects how everything else behaves. There might be a visual metaphor for that somewhere.”
206. “It’s all part of it, man.”
207. “A leaf of all colors plays a golden-string fiddle to a double-e waterfall over my back.”
208. “There’s a need for a ritual, and for real joy, and real bliss, real fun.”
209. “Well, you know Tom, I’m no health nut.”
210. “I’m involved in something that is more open-ended.”
Were Your Thoughts About Drugs Influenced by These Quotes?
Jerry Garcia was well-praised by fellow musicians and personalities in the industry. His band, the Grateful Dead, has become a real rock icon and has garnered a lot of recognition throughout its time. Jerry Garcia’s fame and legacy was proven when he was inducted in the esteemed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the year 1994.
He was never afraid to speak out about his support for the legalization of illegal drugs and his opposition to the government, especially its laws. He was very passionate about imparting his thoughts on achieving a deeper understanding about human consciousness and the universal reality.
The words he said teaches us to be more hungry for knowledge and for the things that we are passionate about. He teaches us to be outspoken and comfortable in talking about topics that are close to our hearts, even if some people don’t agree with our stand.
Do you agree with his political views? What can you say about his take on drugs? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.
