Top 50 Jeff Buckley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Be the best. No negativity. No weakness. No acquiescence to fear or disaster. No errors of ignorance. No evasion to reality.”

— Jeff Buckley

2. “I just want to have a completely adventurous, passionate, weird life.”

— Jeff Buckley

3. “If you feel blocked, do not turn to others, but look inside, in silence, for the enemy of your progress.”

— Jeff Buckley

4. “In love we are all brothers and sisters.”

— Jeff Buckley

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

— Jeff Buckley

Featured in: Guitar Quotes

6. “You can’t kill the past by denying the past. You can kill it only by making it obsolete. And even in that, you have to find honor in the past. You can’t hack off pieces of yourself, and expect them to grow again.”

— Jeff Buckley

7. “Music should be like making love. Sometimes you want it soft and tender, another time you want it hard and aggressive.”

— Jeff Buckley

8. “Love heals all wounds and not just time alone.”

— Jeff Buckley

9. “We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.”

— Jeff Buckley

10. “I prefer to learn everything through music. If you want divinity, the music in every human being and their love for music is pretty much it. It’s the big indication of their spirituality and their ability to love and make love, or feel pain or joy, and really manifest it, really be real.”

— Jeff Buckley

11. “Fight despite the crowds of the walking dead.”

— Jeff Buckley

12. “Your soul can fly outward, stringed to your ribcage like a shimmering kite in the shape of an open hand. Be still and listen to the evidence of your own holiness.”

— Jeff Buckley

13. “And though the meaning fits, there’s no relief in this. I miss my beautiful friend.”

— Jeff Buckley

14. “Above all do not give yourself airs. Breaking the moment of past habits is the challenge here: In the life of the spirit you are always at the beginning.”

— Jeff Buckley

15. “Words are beautiful but restricted. They’re very masculine, with a compact frame. But voice is over the dark, the place where there’s nothing to hang on: it comes from a part of yourself that simply knows, expresses itself, and is.”

— Jeff Buckley

16. “Turn your head away from the screen, my friend. It will tell you nothing more.”

— Jeff Buckley

17. “Grace is what matters, in anything... That’s a quality I admire quite greatly. It keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly, keeps you from destroying things too foolishly. It keeps you alive and it keeps you open for more understanding.”

— Jeff Buckley

18. “But music seems to me to be the most closely identified with my soul. I mean, I feel that it’s the best for me. It just gets into the bloodstream so quickly, for no reason at all. You can close your heart, and you can sleep even with your eyes closed, but you can never close your ears.”

— Jeff Buckley

19. “The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It’s not my information, it’s not mine. I didn’t make it. I just discovered it.”

— Jeff Buckley

20. “I’ve already created my own thing.”

— Jeff Buckley

21. “The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It’s worth being bashed against. It’s worth getting scarred by. It’s worth pouring yourself over every one of its coals.”

— Jeff Buckley

22. “Too young to hold on and too old to just break free and run.”

— Jeff Buckley

23. “There’s no time for hatred, only questions. Where is love? Where is happiness? What is life? Where is peace?”

— Jeff Buckley

24. “I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.”

— Jeff Buckley

25. “Sensitivity isn’t about being wimpy. It’s about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom.”

— Jeff Buckley

26. “I sacrificed my anonymity for my father, whereas he sacrificed me for his fame.”

— Jeff Buckley

27. “I’ve always felt that the quality of the voice is where the real content of a song lies. Words only suggest an experience, but the voice is that experience.”

— Jeff Buckley

28. “I resent the fact that a parental warning sticker has to be included on an album as cover art. To me that’s censorship.”

— Jeff Buckley

29. “Apparently orgasm is the only point where your mind becomes completely empty – you think of nothing for that second. That’s why it’s so compelling – it’s a tiny taste of death. Your mind is void – you have nothing in your head save white light.”

— Jeff Buckley

30. “I want to be ripped apart by music...”

— Jeff Buckley

31. “Music was like my first real toy. I was an only child for a while, and I was alone a lot of the time – and I liked it. I still like being alone.”

— Jeff Buckley

32. “Escape is no longer called for or even especially healthy. Escape from life is death.”

— Jeff Buckley

33. “There’s the moon asking to stay long enough for the clouds to fly me away.”

— Jeff Buckley

34. “I don’t really need to be remembered. I hope the music’s remembered.”

— Jeff Buckley

35. “To do something that will just fly away is kind of special. Every time somebody tell you they love you, that “I love you” flies away, and you wait until the next one.”

— Jeff Buckley

36. “When all of this music sounds like you know what you want to say, then it will have been of all worth, ever. You will be something complete unto yourself, present and unique.”

— Jeff Buckley

37. “If you want to get somewhere in this life, learn to draw beautiful women.”

— Jeff Buckley

38. “If you do anything regularly for a while, sooner or later the weirdoes will show up.”

— Jeff Buckley

39. “Fate is gonna find you in your glass of champagne.”

— Jeff Buckley

40. “Fall in light, grow in light.”

— Jeff Buckley

41. “I like a spirituality with a God that knows how to drive a car, that knows how to take his girl to the dance club, dance all night, have a little drink, kiss the kid when they come back in and go to sleep. God doesn’t need a chauffeur – he needs to drive himself.”

— Jeff Buckley

42. “Thinking so hard on her soft eyes and memories of the signs that it’s over. It’s over.”

— Jeff Buckley

43. “I’m convinced I got signed because of who I am. And it makes me sad.”

— Jeff Buckley

44. “There is no good singing, there is only present and absent.”

— Jeff Buckley

45. “A tune has to resonate with whatever is happening around it.”

— Jeff Buckley

46. “Kiss me out of desire, but not consolation.”

— Jeff Buckley

47. “The people who raised me musically are my mother, who is a classically trained pianist, and my stepfather.”

— Jeff Buckley

48. “I don’t want my reputation to take me over, I just want to be judged on my songs. I want people to come and see me because they want to, not because fashion dictates it.”

— Jeff Buckley

49. “I surrendered who I was to who you are...”

— Jeff Buckley

50. “I want to be ripped apart by music. I want it to be something that feeds and replenishes, or that totally sucks the life out of you. I want to be dashed against the rocks.”

— Jeff Buckley