Top 40 Guitar Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m only myself when I have a guitar in my hands.”

— George Harrison

Also featured in: Music Quotes

2. “Your sound is in your hands as much as anything. It’s the way you pick, and the way you hold the guitar, more than it is the amp or the guitar you use.”

— Stevie Ray Vaughan

Also featured in: Music Quotes

3. “I play guitar because it lets me dream out loud.”

— Michael Hedges

4. “Shut Up and Play your Guitar.”

— Frank Zappa

Also featured in: Sarcastic Quotes

5. “All I’ve got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth.”

— Bob Dylan

6. “My guitar is like my best friend. My guitar can get me through anything. If I can sit down and write an amazing song with my guitar about what’s going on in life, then that’s the greatest therapy for me.”

— Miley Cyrus

7. “My first love was the sound of guitar.”

— Boz Scaggs

8. “You can only make a good noise on the guitar if you’re committed. Little careful noise doesn’t work. You have to be bold.”

— Hans Zimmer

9. “Let me live my life the way I want to.”

— Jimi Hendrix

Also featured in: Enjoy Life Quotes, Be Yourself Quotes, Freedom Quotes, Individuality Quotes

10. “The disgusting stink of a too-loud electric guitar; now that’s my idea of a good time.”

— Frank Zappa

11. “If you can’t play as good or as fast as me, just give up, sell your guitar on eBay and kill yourself.”

— John Petrucci

12. “Tonight I just need my guitar.”

— Jimmy Buffett

13. “If I don’t practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.”

— Jascha Heifetz

Also featured in: Consistency Quotes, Mastery Quotes

14. “Country music isn’t a guitar, it isn’t a banjo, it isn’t a melody, it isn’t a lyric. It’s a feeling.”

— Waylon Jennings

15. “I still believe in the need for guitars and drums and desperate poetry.”

— Frank Turner

16. “I just love playing guitar, so that’s what I’m going to do.”

— St. Vincent

17. “When the intellectual part of guitar playing overrides the spiritual, you don’t get to extreme heights.”

— John Frusciante

18. “The guitar is an orchestra in itself.”

— Ludwig van Beethoven

19. “I guess you go too far when pianos try to be guitars.”

— Tori Amos

20. “A child playing air guitar plays no wrong notes.”

— Victor Wooten

21. “I just go where the guitar takes me.”

— Angus Young

22. “I just want to be a guy with a guitar.”

— Jeff Buckley

23. “Starts out slow and then fizzles out altogether.”

— Neil Young

24. “If you pick up a guitar and it says, ‘take me, I’m yours,’ then that’s the one for you.”

— Frank Zappa

25. “A guitar has moonlight in it.”

— James M. Cain

26. “I am up there onstage alone with that guitar. I don’t have to consider no one else and whether they are comfortable. I need very little.”

— Lauryn Hill

27. “Like Paul Kraston said, all I ask in life is a water bed, a TV and a typewriter. Well, I’ll just have an ordinary bed, a TV and a guitar.”

— John Lennon

28. “My God is rock’n’roll. It’s an obscure power that can change your life. The most important part of my religion is to play guitar.”

— Lou Reed

29. “I’m not a good guitar player.”

— Adam Jones

30. “He holds his guitar like a Tommy gun.”

— Elvis Presley

31. “I sing a bit and play guitar.”

— Jesse Metcalfe

32. “When God plays guitar he uses Jeff Beck’s hands.”

— Steve Lukather

33. “I write lyrics. I play the guitar. If the rest of the band had to do my schedule, they would be dead.”

— John Frusciante

34. “Gonna wind it up on my guitar. Gonna make that silver sing.”

— Tom Petty

35. “We don’t play slow and we don’t play fast, we play half fast.”

— Louis Armstrong

36. “When I was 17 I got a guitar for my birthday and started discovering Bob Dylan and James Taylor and the whole ’60s thing, and that made me want to make songs, to go beyond just playing an instrument. I needed to write I guess.”

— Jason Reeves

37. “All I want for Christmas is a rock n roll electric guitar...”

— Chuck Berry

38. “Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.”

— Terry Pratchett

39. “I’m left handed, but my dad taught me to play guitar right-handed.”

— Dustin Diamond

40. “When I lived in a little flat in Pimlico in 1981, I’d write in the hallway. As you walked in, there was a tiny little recess type thing, hardly a hallway, really, and I’d sit there writing songs with my guitar.”

— Paul Weller