Top 70 Bryce Courtenay Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do.”

— Bryce Courtenay

2. “First with the head, then with the heart.”

— Bryce Courtenay

3. “Dare your genius to walk the wildest unknown ways.”

— Bryce Courtenay

4. “Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.”

— Bryce Courtenay

5. “Always listen to yourself. It is better to be wrong than to simply follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you will grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.”

— Bryce Courtenay

6. “Never take advice from a donkey.”

— Bryce Courtenay

7. “One thing is certain in life. Just when things are going well, soon afterward they are certain to go wrong. It’s just the way things are meant to be.”

— Bryce Courtenay

8. “I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.”

— Bryce Courtenay

9. “But I was still alive, and in my book, where there’s life, there’s hope.”

— Bryce Courtenay

10. “Sometimes, very occasionally, you do your best boxing with your mouth.”

— Bryce Courtenay

11. “Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.”

— Bryce Courtenay

12. “Racism does not diminish with brains, it’s a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn’t necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!”

— Bryce Courtenay

13. “Words are like diamonds. Polish them too much, and all you get are pebbles.”

— Bryce Courtenay

14. “It is better just to get on with the business of living and minding your own business and maybe, if God likes the way you do things, he may just let you flower for a day or a night. But don’t go pestering and begging and telling him all your stupid little sins, that way you will spoil his day.”

— Bryce Courtenay

15. “In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also.”

— Bryce Courtenay

16. “I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country.”

— Bryce Courtenay

17. “You can’t go feeding your hate on the past, it’s not natural.”

— Bryce Courtenay

18. “Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.”

— Bryce Courtenay

19. “If I were king of the world there wouldn’t be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.”

— Bryce Courtenay

20. “Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.”

— Bryce Courtenay

21. “Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance. -Doc.”

— Bryce Courtenay

22. “People say I don’t write books, I make Christmas presents.”

— Bryce Courtenay

23. “It’s not what a man does, it’s what a man is that counts!”

— Bryce Courtenay

24. “I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.”

— Bryce Courtenay

25. “A man on the run finds compassion or loveor even pretended innocence his greatest source of danger.”

— Bryce Courtenay

26. “What’s the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. For me it doesn’t, anyway.”

— Bryce Courtenay

27. “The imagination is always the best torturer.”

— Bryce Courtenay

28. “Small can beat big, but you must have a plan.”

— Bryce Courtenay

29. “I wish to cup knowledge in my hand and drink it as one drinks water by the side of the stream.”

— Bryce Courtenay

30. “I have found in life that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.”

— Bryce Courtenay

31. “Nothing is unexplained. Nature is a chain reaction. Everything is dependent on something else. The smallest is as important as the largest.”

— Bryce Courtenay

32. “When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.”

— Bryce Courtenay

33. “Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been.”

— Bryce Courtenay

34. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. There comes a time in everything when you don’t know something.”

— Bryce Courtenay

35. “Over all this lay Hoppie’s dictum: First with the head and then with the heart. Winning was something you worked at intellectually, emotion clouds the mind and is its natural enemy. This made for a loneliness which often let me aching to share an emotion but equally afraid that if I did so I would reveal a weakness which could later be used against me.”

— Bryce Courtenay

36. “You’ve got to be quick on your feet in this world if you want to survive. Though once you know the rules, it is not too hard to play the game.”

— Bryce Courtenay

37. “Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.”

— Bryce Courtenay

38. “It’s good to be a little frightened. It’s good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp. In the fight game, the head rules the heart. But in the end the heart is the boss.”

— Bryce Courtenay

39. “Life is all beginnings and ends. Nothing stays the same, lad.”

— Bryce Courtenay

40. “Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.”

— Bryce Courtenay

41. “When a man knows somebody cares he keeps some small place, a corner maybe of his soul clean and lit.”

— Bryce Courtenay

42. “It was the first time I’d realised that the giant in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ was an Afrikaner.”

— Bryce Courtenay

43. “The time we are given for parenting is so short, passes so quickly and is jumbled up with so many other priorities and disruptions that, in the end, we come to doubt that we used it in the best interests of our children.”

— Bryce Courtenay

44. “I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor.”

— Bryce Courtenay

45. “The smile, madame, is used by humans to hide the truth, the artist is only interested to reveal the truth.”

— Bryce Courtenay

46. “It’s who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what’s jealous of you the power to bring you undone.”

— Bryce Courtenay

47. “I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller.”

— Bryce Courtenay

48. “Oupa took no notice of us just as he took no notice of his real grandchildren.”

— Bryce Courtenay

49. “Generosity overpowers greed.”

— Bryce Courtenay

50. “I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.”

— Bryce Courtenay