Jerome John Garcia was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known for being a principal songwriter, the lead guitarist, and a vocalist with the rock band the Grateful Dead, of which he was a founding member and which came to prominence during the counterculture of the 1960s. Although he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader or “spokesman” of the group. These Jerry Garcia quotes will motivate you.
Best Jerry Garcia Quotes
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t wanna know.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “Too much of a good thing is just about right” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “Magic is what we do, music is how we do it.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “Sometimes the lights all shining on me, other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me what a long strange trip it’s been.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “You don’t want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “Nothing left to do but smile.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “Truth is something you stumble into when you think you’re going someplace else.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“All I know is, if you listen to society, you’ll never get anywhere!” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “To me, that’s the key thing, the pursuit of happiness. That’s the basic, ultimate freedom.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future!” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“We’re involved in a society which is undergoing some really weird changes now.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That’s the nature of America, I think.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“If the thunder don’t get ya then the lightning will.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“There’s a need for a ritual and for real joy and real bliss. Real fun.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “I equate Deadheads to people that like black licorice. There aren’t many people that like black licorice, but the ones that do, REALLY REALLY like it! Or buttermilk, or whatever.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “The nature of what we’re doing is something, which is by its very nature, is 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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “You can’t repeat things because each time is different. The universe has changed. Everything has changed.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “Right now, America is under the gun. It’s being tested and is being co-opted in a big way.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “What a long strange trip it’s been.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“Every silver lining has a touch of grey.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “… Grateful Dead – that’s it !! … nobody in the band liked it, (the name) 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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “Run faster, jump higher, reach farther, and you’ll always win!” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.” ~ Jerry Garcia
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“American society has gone completely into denial.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “If you assume you haven’t learned anything yet, there’s no reason your playing can’t stay dynamic all your life.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “The bigger issue was the whole takeover of the food industry by big corporations.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “We were very fortunate to have a little time in history when LSD was still legal and were able to experiment with drugs just like we were doing with music.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “If you are picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking Evil.” ~ Jerry Garcia
- “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.” ~ Jerry Garcia
