Magic is what we do, music is how we do it. — Jerry Garcia

Now there is no place you can go where you don’t hear certain types of music. — Jerry Garcia

If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects. — Jerry Garcia

Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia

We were very fortunate to have a 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

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

If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia

I’m not Beethoven! — Jerry Garcia

This virtual reality stuff is the technological equivalent, really, of psychedelics. — Jerry Garcia

Stuff that’s hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don’t know what it does. — Jerry Garcia

And as far as I’m concerned, it’s like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia

In this universe the top end is light and the bottom end is real hard stuff. — Jerry Garcia

You reach into cyberspace and you grab some cyber stuff, build it up, and the computer will give you a 360 of it. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia

Don’t tell me this town ‘aint got no heart — 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

There is no dogma, there isn’t anything about how the universe works. — Jerry Garcia

If something doesn’t work, it becomes obvious immediately. This just isn’t going to work. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia

Some things may work, but they definitely won’t work every time. Some things may work at various times. — 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

The satisfaction of producing a work of art is the thing of getting off on it on some level. — Jerry Garcia

Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk. — Jerry Garcia

We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life. — Jerry Garcia

Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives. — 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

Live life expecting the worst, hoping for the best, and living for the future! — Jerry Garcia

It’s like I always say. When life gives you lemons, you sell some of your grandma’s jewelry, and go clubbing. — Jean Ralphio

If you assume you haven’t learned anything yet, there’s no reason your playing can’t stay dynamic all your life. — Jerry Garcia

Right now, America is under the gun. It’s being tested and is being co–opted in a big way. — Jerry Garcia

What we do is as American as lynch mobs. America has always been a complex place. — Jerry Garcia

Kerouac was a breeze, some kind of incredible super–American, mythos personality blasting through the highways of 1947 America. — 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

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

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. — 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 world that you can go walk outside and walk around the block. That’s reality. The reality that’s being talked about is something else entirely. — Jerry Garcia

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. — Jerry Garcia