A lot of people said to me, ‘Enough with the guest vocalists for a while. We want to hear the Mexican play the guitar!’ – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
Ever since I was a child I’ve always been very attracted to melodies. Whether I hear Jeff Beck, a choir, an ocean or the wind, there’s always a melody in there. – Carlos Santana
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! – Carlos Santana
I’m ready to do something with Lady Gaga or Andrea Bocelli. I’m really grateful that nothing is out of the realm of possibility. – Carlos Santana
Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they talk like victims. – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace. – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that. – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
Your wrinkles either show that you’re nasty, cranky, and senile, or that you’re always smiling. – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
Some songs are just like tattoos for your brain… you hear them and they’re affixed to you. – Carlos Santana
I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time. – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
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. – Carlos Santana
