Carlos Santana

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Everybody sooner or later has to drop the luggage and the baggage of illusions.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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