Alice Coltrane
You're creating ' it comes from the heart, the spirit, the soul. You're not manufacturing somebody else's plan, somebody else's blueprint, somebody else's idea that's not yours. So when you're creating, that's the beauty side of art, you know? It comes from within you.Collection: Art
Just as it is fire's nature to burn, it is meditation's nature to heal, to bring peace and uplift you beyond your worldly environment and transport you to a higher plane.Collection: Peace
Once, John and I were coming form a concert that he had played, and it was late in the morning. We heard a couple leaving, and the lady said, oh, I have to hurry home. I'm going to church tomorrow. And her friends said, church? You've already been to church.Collection: Home
The music is within your heart, your soul, your spirit, and this is all I did when I sat at piano. I just go within.Collection: Music
When looking through the spiritual eye, or the third eye encased within the human mind, one can see vividly beyond the ken of human eyesight, beyond the material atom, and into the future, thereby transcending the limitations of time and space.Collection: Space
When you quiet your mind, you can enter a world of clarity, peace and understanding.Collection: Peace
Look at what trance means. It means to transcend... it means to become transcendental! So if we get a singular transcendental path of light, that could lead to such great dimensions of consciousness, of revelation, of spirituality, of spiritual power.
Communicating with people was found to be like suffering judgment. In fact, it was almost impossible for me to dwell upon earthly matters, and equally impossible for me to bring the mind down to mundane thoughts and general conversations.
Maybe other musicians are interested in different things, maybe they have greater monetary concerns. I hear people who have not changed, who haven't elevated anything, who are the same as they were back in the '50s and '60s.
The mind is a great gift, but it has to be quieted down in order to feel, hear and see the presence of God.
After I fulfilled my Warners contract, I really wanted to go deeper into what the Lord wanted me to do.
I didn't have to inspire John toward the avant-garde; he did not need anything from me. That is why it's so interesting that critics decided to dislike me. At some point the members of the quartet felt it was time for a change, and left on their own.
John not only taught me to explore, but to play thoroughly and completely.
When John said that he wanted me to play with him on piano, I told him that there were many others who were qualified. He said, 'I want you there because you can do it.'
You have got to stress the freedom of music to really branch out and be universal.
I came through the bebop era, and to me that was enough.
I didn't want to be equal to him. I didn't have to be equal to him and do what he did. That, I never considered. I don't think like that. And whatever in the women's liberation - that's what they want. I didn't want to be equal to him. I wanted to be a wife.
I believe that meditation is the highest spiritual practice, the pathway to God.
I don't feel deprived in not completing my artistic endeavors.
God's work was what I felt was the greater work.
Women have been held back and limited throughout the centuries. Creation could not have been rendered, not even considered, let alone be brought into manifestation without woman. She is principal, a powerful energy. She is first.Collection: Powerful
It was so interesting, when [John Coltrane] created A Love Supreme. He had meditated that week. I almost didn't see him downstairs. And it was so quiet! There was no sound, no practice! He was up there meditating, and when he came down he said, "I have a whole new music!" He said, "There is a new recording that I will do, I have it all, everything." And it was so beautiful! He was like Moses coming down from the mountain. And when he recorded it, he knew everything, everything. He said this was the first time that he had all the music in his head at once to record.Collection: Music
...I got a call from a record company offering me a contract, I did not want to take it because the Lord had pointed me in the direction of spiritual activity...And then it was disclosed to me that I could do both spiritual and musical work. So for five years I executed that contract, and when it was finished, after I made the album Transfiguration, I didn't make another album until twenty-six years later. This new album, Translinear Light, came out of the pleading and constant appealing from my son Ravi Coltrane: 'Ma, please make a CD.' So I eventually agreed.Collection: Music