Top 44 Matisyahu Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Matisyahu Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I don't partake, really, of any of the typical rock-sta

I don’t partake, really, of any of the typical rock-star-lifestyle things you could think of. I try to be responsible when I’m out on the road. I take it pretty seriously, what I’m doing, as something that’s good for the world, and my family, and everyone.
Matisyahu
I would say that as I’ve gotten older, I trust my intuition more; I allow myself more freedom both musically, creatively and my own life existentially.
Matisyahu
What is it to keep kosher? Is it eating kosher potato chips? Kosher is a bigger idea. I think it’s about being healthy. But according to some people, it’s about not eating this food because it’s forbidden by the Jewish law. My view of the halachah changed a little bit. The laws are there hopefully to be a tool.
Matisyahu
I think my music has always been a mixture, depending on whom I’m working with – what band, what musicians, what producer.
Matisyahu
I don’t think you could pull one Bob Marley song that didn’t have quotes from the Torah or the Old Testament.
Matisyahu
When I became religious, it was full-force for me. And, through the lifestyle of being out on the road with non-Jewish musicians, in non-Jewish nightclubs and going all over the world – getting out of the shtetl – opened me up to having experiences that other religious men might not have to think or worry about.
Matisyahu
My music is really about people connecting with their identities, even if they aren’t Jewish.
Matisyahu
Growing up, the way that I looked was very important to me. I was always trying to impress people, and when I grew my beard there was a certain freedom, a separation, getting past this the way I looked, identify myself as a spiritual seeker.
Matisyahu
When I started wearing a yarmulke, I wanted to stand out or take the form of whatever was inspiring me. But now I think there’s something to not working it, to keeping it on the inside, and it just being kind of like a secret.
Matisyahu
The idea that God’s mercy is connected to whether or not I shave is ludicrous, and I need to just trust myself, and that, you know, if I’m deserving of God’s mercy, I’ll get it, regardless of, you know, my beard.
Matisyahu
It’s a holistic process for me during a show. I’m always focusing on the technical aspects of my voice. I try to make my voice do what I want. One big thing I do to improve on each show is to listen back to performances on CD while on tour.
Matisyahu
I still believe there is a lot of truth in Orthodox Judaism, but not the whole truth. Each person has his truth that he has to discover. You don’t necessarily have to mold yourself to another idea of who you are.
Matisyahu
I think that listening to music or creating music is a spiritual undertaking, so the process of creating music, you know, involves listening. It involves sensitivity, it involves humility, you know, and then also it’s something which is higher than words.
Matisyahu
When there’s light shining on a tree, that tree takes on different meaning. If there’s no light at all it just looks dead. If you look at light as godly meaning, the world comes alive in a certain way.
Matisyahu
The religious lifestyle keeps you focused. It’s helpful when trying to manoeuvre through the music scene.
Matisyahu
Literally, there is a lot of talk about sparks in the Kabbalah. It talks about when God created the world initially, there was an explosion that happened like a Big Bang but based on vessels and light.
Matisyahu
There was a time when I was fighting with the decision as to whether or not a Hasidic man could go out and have a music career in the world and be involved in pop culture. For me, I was able to bring those two things together for quite some time.
Matisyahu
I always knew I was different and that people had opinions about me. I guess I learned as best as I can to shield out a lot and live my life from within.
Matisyahu
I did some acting in college. But then everything stopped when I was a junior, in the fall of 2001, when I started becoming religious. Once I became a full-on Hasidic, I stopped everything. I stopped music. I stopped acting.
Matisyahu
I started out in the Chabad movement, and I started pretty closed up, with the idea of there being that ‘this is it.’ I bought into that fully. I really explored in depth the Chabad ideology.
Matisyahu
Vocal rest is awesome. It is like any kind of fast. Firstly, it is a purification of speech. It made me realize how not careful I am with the things I say. It also makes you find new ways of communication and new methods to connect with people.
Matisyahu
Whenever I approach a record, I don’t really have a science to it. I approach every record differently. First record was in a home studio. Second record was a live record. Third record was made while I was on tour. Fourth record was made over the course of, like, two years in David Kahn’s basement.
Matisyahu
Some artists are bound to an image: Bob Marley has dreadlocks, Matisyahu has a beard. But that’s a reminder that the whole thing is not about style. It’s about music.
Matisyahu
I enjoyed coming home to Crown Heights. There was a certain order to life there. You know, Shabbos, spending time with your family, eating and being in ‘shul.’ Prayers at nighttime, prayers in the morning. Everyone knows everybody; you walk your kids everywhere.
Matisyahu
I do what I love, thank God. I get to make music and get inspiration through Judaism. I can see why people might be surprised, because it’s not been done before. It’s certainly not typical. People are always trying to wrap head their around it. But it’s probably simpler than everyone thinks.
Matisyahu
I always had a love of music, from the time I was a little kid, dressing up and singing along with Michael Jackson songs.
Matisyahu
The real reason Jews don’t have more Hanukkah music is that, historically, American Jewish singer-songwriters were too busy making Christmas music. ‘White Christmas,’ ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ ‘Silver Bells’ and ‘The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting)’ were all written by Jews.
Matisyahu
I started at home as a kid putting on shows and lip-syncing Michael Jackson for the grown-ups. Then, in musicals and plays in school. At 17, I was performing in coffee shops and in parking lots at Phish shows. At 18, I had a band that played local shows in the Northwest.
Matisyahu
When I went to see certain shows when I was a kid, they changed my life. They made me tap into that place inside myself that I was unable to get to, so music is that tool, that bridge, and that’s the kind of music I’m interested in making.
Matisyahu
I get on a real serious health kick when I’m on the road, because as a singer, you can’t really get sick. If you get sick, your whole instrument stops working. I’ve done all these different vitamin drinks. I drink coconut water, and I run. I eat food. I juice.
Matisyahu
Every record I do is a learning process for how I want to do the next one.
Matisyahu
The place that I'm trying to come from and where I'm tr

The place that I’m trying to come from and where I’m trying to make music from is when I feel like I’m able to somehow, like, transcend it all and just speak right to God.
Matisyahu
I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn’t a major part of our existence.
Matisyahu
There’s something really powerful when I, for example, hear Bob Marley’s ‘Exodus’ – we know where we’re going. We know where we’re from.
Matisyahu
Music is my first love and the thing that I feel extremely connected to. I feel like I still have a long way to go within that in terms of being able to perform and write songs. But, yeah, I really hope ‘The Possession’ opens doors for me to do more acting, because I really enjoyed it.
Matisyahu
With ‘Light,’ I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first – they were written before the music.
Matisyahu
I remember the moment when it hit me. I was walking down Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, and it felt like I was literally walking out of a jail cell that I had been in. At that moment, I realized I could shave if I wanted. It was up to me and no one else.
Matisyahu
I have a whole regimen to my day: my vocal warm-ups, my prayers, my meditations… I pray three times a day. I try to have a real experience praying, not just do it. I really get deep into the idea and really try to get somewhere with it, to have an in-depth understanding of the idea.
Matisyahu
Reggae music isn’t Jewish, but a lot of the ideas are.
Matisyahu
My music is not really about one ideology. It’s not about one truth.
Matisyahu
When a person listens to a good song, and they can look out at the world and their lives and see the dark and the light, the negative and the positive, all the different elements, all come together in one holistic poem, that is a very healing and very reductive thing, and that’s what my music is about.
Matisyahu
It was a really strange way that I came into music. Once I gave voice to it, the pit of emotions that I guess I knew was inside of me for a long time, the stream never really stopped.
Matisyahu
Music has always been such an amazing tool for me to access self and emotion.
Matisyahu
I’m not an expert in instruments, beat programming, or electronics. For some people it’s all about doing it themselves. But for me, it’s all about find the people that can help make my vision come true.
Matisyahu