Stevie Wonder, born Stevland Hardaway Judkins, on May 13, 1950, is an iconic American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. Blind from infancy, Wonder demonstrated musical talent from a young age, signing with Motown Records at just 11 years old. His early hits in the 1960s, such as “Fingertips” and “Uptight (Everything’s Alright),” showcased his prodigious skills as a vocalist and musician. In the 1970s, Wonder’s music took on greater depth and complexity, with albums like “Innervisions” and “Songs in the Key of Life” earning critical acclaim and commercial success. His fusion of soul, funk, and jazz, coupled with socially conscious lyrics, established him as a musical visionary. Throughout his career, Wonder has amassed numerous accolades, including 25 Grammy Awards. Beyond music, he’s been an advocate for social justice and disability rights. Stevie Wonder remains an influential figure in music and continues to inspire generations worldwide.
Stevie Wonder Quotes
1. “We all have ability. The difference is how we use it.”
— Stevie Wonder
2. “Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.”
— Stevie Wonder
3. “Time is long but life is short.”
— Stevie Wonder
4. “There may be a brighter star. But through my eyes the light of you is all I see.”
— Stevie Wonder
5. “You are the sunshine of my life That’s why I’ll always be around, You are the apple of my eye, Forever you’ll stay in my heart.”
— Stevie Wonder
6. “Shattered dreams, worthless years, here I am encased in a hollow shell. Life began, then was done, now I stare into a cold and empty well.”
— Stevie Wonder
7. “Use your heart to love somebody. And If your heart is big enough, use your heart to love EVERYBODY.”
— Stevie Wonder
8. “Life has meaning only in the struggle. Triumph or defeat is in the hands of the Gods. So let us celebrate the struggle!”
— Stevie Wonder
9. “You can’t base your life on other people’s expectations.”
— Stevie Wonder
10. “When you’re moving in the positive, your destination is the brightest star.”
— Stevie Wonder
11. “Isn’t she lovely made from love?”
— Stevie Wonder
12. “Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.”
— Stevie Wonder
13. “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.”
— Stevie Wonder
14. “Hate knows that love is the cure.”
— Stevie Wonder
15. “What I’m not confused about is the world needing much more love, no hate, no prejudice, no bigotry and more unity, peace and understanding. Period.”
— Stevie Wonder
16. “Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.”
— Stevie Wonder
17. “It could have been worse. I could have been born black.”
— Stevie Wonder
18. “If we begin to stop spewing the negative and really move into using our voices and our pens and our abilities that we have to reach millions of people to the positive, we can make a difference in the world.”
— Stevie Wonder
19. “There’s a Place in the Sun, where there’s hope for everyone.”
— Stevie Wonder
20. “Rap to me is a modern blues. But until we really confront the truth, we are going to have a Tupac or Eminem or Biggie Smalls to remind us about it – and thank God.”
— Stevie Wonder
21. “I’m too high, but I ain’t left the ground.”
— Stevie Wonder
22. “Do you know, it’s funny, but I never thought of being blind as a disadvantage, and I never thought of being black as a disadvantage.”
— Stevie Wonder
23. “I’m believing that miracles and blessings still exist…”
— Stevie Wonder
24. “I am not a normal man.”
— Stevie Wonder
25. “Families buying dog food now, starvation roams the streets. Babies die before their born, infected by the grief.”
— Stevie Wonder
26. “Music at its essence is what gives us memories.”
— Stevie Wonder
27. “You can’t hear me? Read my lips!”
— Stevie Wonder
28. “It’s up to to you to perfect that gift that you’ve been given. Put your spirit into that song. Focus on the words that you are singing. Get into the experience that you are singing about and sing your heart out.”
— Stevie Wonder
29. “We’re stuck in fear and in not wanting to cross that most important bridge of understanding that we’re more alike or not. We all cry, we all laugh.”
— Stevie Wonder
30. “I listen a lot to rap, and I’m inspired to take it, to use it in another way, to get the message across.”
— Stevie Wonder
31. “Until we Dream of Life and Life becomes a Dream…”
— Stevie Wonder
32. “When I grow up I wanna be like Omar.”
— Stevie Wonder
33. “Mama gives you money for Sunday school, you trade yours for candy after church is through.”
— Stevie Wonder
34. “Change your words into truths and then change that truth into LOVE…”
— Stevie Wonder
35. “There’re songs to make you smile, there’re songs to make you sad. But with a happy song to sing it never seems as bad.”
— Stevie Wonder
36. “Music can measure how broad our horizons are. My mind wants to see to infinity.”
— Stevie Wonder
37. “I’m glad I’m blind and can’t see it.”
— Stevie Wonder
38. “Sometimes I’m very disappointed at some of the people in our family of communicators, whether it be a songwriter or a rapper that’s always talking about negativity or a singer or a columnist or a network that basically gets off on just trying to create the negative.”
— Stevie Wonder
39. “I’m a work in progress, but if I know in my heart that I’m doing my best, that my heart’s in the right place, that I have unconditional love, I feel okay.”
— Stevie Wonder
40. “When the truths of love are planted firm, they won’t be hard to find. And words of love I speak to you will echo in your mind.”
— Stevie Wonder
41. “There are a lot of things happening that show us that this, right now, is a time to love.”
— Stevie Wonder
42. “I see the light in your smile.”
— Stevie Wonder
43. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
— Stevie Wonder
44. “It feels better to love than to hate.”
— Stevie Wonder
45. “Sometimes I wish I could drive a car, but I’m gonna drive a car one day, so I don’t worry about that.”
— Stevie Wonder
46. “When I was a child, kids used to make fun of me because I was blind. But I just became more curious, ‘How can I climb this tree and get an apple for this girl?’ That’s what mattered to me.”
— Stevie Wonder
47. “Just because a record has a groove don’t make it in the groove.”
— Stevie Wonder
48. “There’s only one true king of rock ‘n’ roll. His name is Chuck Berry.”
— Stevie Wonder
49. “Evil, why do you infest the purest thoughts with hatred?”
— Stevie Wonder
50. “Of all the needs that we have right now, more than anything we need a time for love.”
— Stevie Wonder
51. “I am what I am. I love me! And I don’t mean that egotistically – I love that God has allowed me to take whatever it was that I had and to make something out of it.”
— Stevie Wonder
52. “I want to take all the pain that I feel and celebrate and turn it around.”
— Stevie Wonder
53. “With a voice like Ella ringing out there’s no way a band can lose.”
— Stevie Wonder
54. “Don’t need cars cause we’ve learned to fly on Saturn.”
— Stevie Wonder
55. “Problems have solutions.”
— Stevie Wonder
56. “Eyes lie if you ever look into them for the character of the person.”
— Stevie Wonder
57. “I never imagined I’d meet Berry Gordy who told me when he first heard me sing, “You know, your singing’s okay, but I like your harmonica playing better.””
— Stevie Wonder
58. “Exploitation, mutilation, mutations, confirmation to the evils of the world.”
— Stevie Wonder
59. “Minds ripen at very different ages.”
— Stevie Wonder
60. “I do believe in women. I really do.”
— Stevie Wonder
61. “The most important thing is, when I do give the music, I’m satisfied with it, that it speaks for what I want to do.”
— Stevie Wonder
62. “In my career, I learned that giving your services for free gives you a good return on your investment, not just financially but morally. It supplements your personal integrity.”
— Stevie Wonder
63. “People love to hear music on their personal devices, but the issue really becomes, if you’re able to download music, you should know this download and the quality of it is going to be of the highest, and that it has a value to it and on it.”
— Stevie Wonder
64. “I think that to a great degree, reggae companies have become very corporate and so maybe some don’t have that freedom to say whatever they want to say.”
— Stevie Wonder
65. “I’m concerned about how accessible guns are.”
— Stevie Wonder
66. “This is like one thing that I’ve tried to do, and I think successfully, that when you realize that nothing really belongs to you, you begin to appreciate having an understanding of just where your head is at, and you feel so much better.”
— Stevie Wonder
67. “Loving you, until the day that 8 x 8 x 8 x 8 is 4.”
— Stevie Wonder
68. “Smoking cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall, teacher sends you to the Principal’s office down the hall.”
— Stevie Wonder
69. “The Lord that I serve says the impossible is unacceptable.”
— Stevie Wonder
70. “For did my dreams come true when I looked at you. And maybe too, if you would believe, you too might be overjoyed, over loved, over me.”
— Stevie Wonder
71. “Brother says he’s telling about you playing Doctor with that girl.”
— Stevie Wonder
72. “Did you know that true love asks for nothing?”
— Stevie Wonder
73. “Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn’t mean he lacks vision.”
— Stevie Wonder
74. “Sneaking out the back door to hand out with those hoodlum friends of mine.”
— Stevie Wonder
75. “You know, I always when people ask me, like, what is my most favorite song, I quote Duke Ellington, when they would ask him, what’s his favorite composition? And I say, I haven’t written it yet. Because, you know, there are different songs for different occasions.”
— Stevie Wonder
76. “Heaven help the roses if the bombs begin to fall.”
— Stevie Wonder
77. “Those yesterdreams were just a cruel and foolish game we used to play, yester-me, yester-you, yesterday.”
— Stevie Wonder
78. “My mother would cry about my blindness and the hopelessness of my ever seeing, but I told her I wasn’t sad. I believed God had something for me to do.”
— Stevie Wonder
79. “Clearly, love is love, between a man and a woman, a woman and a man, a woman and a woman and a man and a man.”
— Stevie Wonder
80. “I am all for stem cell research.”
— Stevie Wonder
81. “God gave me life to continue to do things that I would never have done.”
— Stevie Wonder
82. “A frowning face can’t bring out the beauty that you are.”
— Stevie Wonder
83. “I know there are thousands of images of me.”
— Stevie Wonder
84. “Gods induction, life’s construction, these instruct will save every living thing. Can’t you see that life’s connected?”
— Stevie Wonder
85. “All I ever wanted to do was music, and all I’ve ever asked, as I’ve gotten to know and discover the world more, is that God would use me in any way to encourage and inspire love and inspire people to bring and give love to each other.”
— Stevie Wonder
86. “Handicaps are really to be used another way to benefit yourself and others.”
— Stevie Wonder
87. “Kenny Burrell is a great musician and his music has helped to make me what I am today.”
— Stevie Wonder
88. “We’re not living in a one-dimensional society. You can’t just talk about, you know, the horrible things in life and the destruction.”
— Stevie Wonder
89. “I feel thankful to God, first and foremost, allowing me to enjoy this ‘smell the roses’ kind of thing.”
— Stevie Wonder
90. “I like the iPhone, the iPad, all the various members of that family. But I like all the various technologies that are becoming available to make the world more accessible to people who are blind and with low vision.”
— Stevie Wonder
91. “Let us come together before we’re annihilated.”
— Stevie Wonder
92. “Even though we sometimes would not get a thing, we were happy with the joy the day would bring.”
— Stevie Wonder
93. “Why has there never been a holiday where peace is celebrated all throughout the world?”
— Stevie Wonder
94. “Troubled heart you’ll know, problems have solutions, trust and I will show.”
— Stevie Wonder
95. “Sometimes, I feel I am really blessed to be blind because I probably would not last a minute if I were able to see things.”
— Stevie Wonder
96. “I’m still experimenting.”
— Stevie Wonder
97. “I always wanted my mother to be Queen for a Day. I always used to watch that show that came on television.”
— Stevie Wonder
98. “Baby, everything is alright, uptight, out of sight.”
— Stevie Wonder
99. “There are people who have let the problems of today lead them to conclude that for them life is not the way.”
— Stevie Wonder
100. “Are you happy when you stick a needle in your vein?”
— Stevie Wonder
101. “My father really was not the dominant person who raised the family, it was my mother who raised the family.”
— Stevie Wonder
102. “My mother gave me an understanding that as good as you think you are, you’re not so great. There’s always room for improvement. The reality is when people don’t have someone to give them a sense of guidance, and say, “Hey, man, that’s not happening,” it’s really hard.”
— Stevie Wonder
103. “Ya gots to work with what you gots to work with.”
— Stevie Wonder
104. “You know, I have seven children, so I guess I know some things about life.”
— Stevie Wonder
105. “Now some folks say that we should be glad for what we have. Tell me, would you be happy in Village Ghetto Land?”
— Stevie Wonder
106. “The exciting thing about a songwriter is that, you know, particularly if you’re a songwriter and an artist and you play the parts and you’re producing it and all that, you have various times you have to critique what you do.”
— Stevie Wonder
107. “My thing was always trying to do as much as I possibly could do. I wanted to do all the things the other kids did in the neighborhood.”
— Stevie Wonder
108. “You’ve got to remember that 25 is a great time because, you know, you’re passed that 21 thing and it’s a high point, a high peak, in life where you’re old enough to say what you have discovered, but you’re still open to discovering more.”
— Stevie Wonder
109. “Blind don’t mean you can’t, you know, listen.”
— Stevie Wonder
110. “It’s my new single – please buy it so we can get Christmas gifts for the kids this year.”
— Stevie Wonder
111. “My mother told me, if you call yourself ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder, you’d better be as good as Little Willie John.”
— Stevie Wonder
112. “Unfortunately, we have warring in the world, so the youngest minds, the brilliant minds, are sent off to war. I think that, you know, you have brilliant people with great possibilities and that’s why I really am not really for war. I really am not.”
— Stevie Wonder
113. “My mother had a rule, obviously, that I couldn’t go across the street by myself, but I had to find a way of doing it.”
— Stevie Wonder
114. “I remember the beginnings of the Kurzweil reading machine. I was one of the first to meet Ray Kurzweil and purchase the reading machine in Boston. To think that the machine was at least two and a half large suitcases at the time, and now you have a camera and it takes a picture and you have sound.”
— Stevie Wonder
115. “I’ve had some incredibly triumphal things happen in my life.”
— Stevie Wonder
116. “I might sing a gospel song in Arabic or do something in Hebrew. I want to mix it up and do it differently than one might imagine.”
— Stevie Wonder
117. “As a matter of fact, wherever I find that law exists, I will not perform in that state or in that part of the world.”
— Stevie Wonder
118. “Through the ages all great men have taught truth and happiness can’t be bought.”
— Stevie Wonder
119. “Among all the wonderful things we have, we don’t seem to have a time to love. And to me that’s the fuel, that’s the fuel we need to make the engine go.”
— Stevie Wonder
120. “For the most part, I feel really comfortable with what I’ve given to the people. I want to give it to them again.”
— Stevie Wonder
121. “I’ve always asked to be able to speak and write about injustice and to do it in a way that would encourage people to make things better for everyone.”
— Stevie Wonder
122. “We know the things that are not good and are right. Those things that we know are wrong, we’ve got to fix them.”
— Stevie Wonder
123. “Sometimes we listen to too many commentators about things that don’t affect their lives because they’re in a different tax bracket. Or to the so-called clergymen giving their interpretation of God’s word, and yet they’re not rolling the same way in their own lives.”
— Stevie Wonder
124. “I was so bad. Out of control. So glad I turned out to be a nice guy.”
— Stevie Wonder
125. “I guess people expect or figure me to be a lot of different things.”
— Stevie Wonder
126. “Here is my music. It is all I have to tell you how I feel. Know that your love keeps my love strong.”
— Stevie Wonder
127. “Shoob-be-doo-be-doo-da-day.”
— Stevie Wonder
128. “When I wrote the words and I have the music, I felt, wow, you know, this has got to be right. I got to sing it right.”
— Stevie Wonder
129. “I might do something in Arabic. I might do something in Hebrew.”
— Stevie Wonder
130. “I am all for anything that is going to better equip a person who is physically challenged in any way, to have an opportunity to be able to do what they are able to do.”
— Stevie Wonder
131. “Mama is the greatest teacher, teacher of love, fearlessness and compassion.”
— Stevie Wonder
132. “I have enough money to satisfy myself for a lifetime.”
— Stevie Wonder
133. “First of all, I’m no better than the next person.”
— Stevie Wonder
134. “Different artists are talking about the laws that exist and how they need to be fixed so that compensation does happen to a far fairer level. And I agree with that.”
— Stevie Wonder
135. “I think honestly, some people who think they’re gay, they’re confused.”
— Stevie Wonder
136. “No one has been a greater advocate for the power of love in this world than I; both in my life and in my music.”
— Stevie Wonder
137. “Call up, ring once, hang up the phone to let me know you made it home. Don’t want nothing to be wrong with my part time lover.”
— Stevie Wonder
138. “When you feel your life’s too hard, just go have a talk with God. Well, he’s the only free psychiatrist that’s known throughout the world.”
— Stevie Wonder
