Top 120 Bryce Courtenay Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Generosity overpowers greed.”

— Bryce Courtenay

52. “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

53. “I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given.”

— Bryce Courtenay

54. “It seemed certain now that small could defeat big. All it took was brains and skills and heart and a perfect plan.”

— Bryce Courtenay

55. “I’m going to die with my mind intact. And to me that is the most exciting way you could possibly die.”

— Bryce Courtenay

56. “Cleverness is a false presumption’, Doc had explained, ’it is like being a natural skater, you are so busy doing tricks to impress that you do not see where the thin ice is and before you know, poof! You are in deep, ice-cold water frozen like a dead herring. Intelligence is a harder gift, for this you must work, you must practise it, challenge it and maybe towards the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow whereas intelligence is the substance.”

— Bryce Courtenay

57. “As a small child I had discovered that only two places are available to those who wish to remain concealed. The choices are to be a nonentity or an exception. You either disappear into a plebeian background or move forward to where most others fear to follow.”

— Bryce Courtenay

58. “I had learned the most important rule in winning-keep thinking.”

— Bryce Courtenay

59. “Luck is a curious companion, it comes to those who believe they hold it, and is an elusive servant to those who doubt they possess it.”

— Bryce Courtenay

60. “My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.”

— Bryce Courtenay

61. “He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers”.”

— Bryce Courtenay

62. “The reader is always right.”

— Bryce Courtenay

63. “The rich become rich by taking, and the poor by giving.”

— Bryce Courtenay

64. “By bedtime Nanny was at my side as usual, arriving with a large sweet potato, its tummy open with a spoon sticking out of the middle, tiny wisps of steam curling upwards and condensing on the handle. There is something about a sweet potato that cheers you up when you are low and it celebrates with you when you are happy. Sweet potatoes baked in their jackets have a very large comfort factor built into them.”

— Bryce Courtenay

65. “While being beaten by the other kids encouraged me to learn a new language, it wasn’t doing my confidence a lot of good.”

— Bryce Courtenay

66. “Humans best survive when they are given a purpose; a common enemy to defeat, revenge to wreak or a dream to cling to.”

— Bryce Courtenay

67. “Life has a habit of going on.”

— Bryce Courtenay

68. “Morrie, as usual, had made his point: good conversational debate is an end to itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human. p385.”

— Bryce Courtenay

69. “I learned that the greatest camouflage of all is consistency. If you do something often enough and at the same time in the same way, you become invisible.”

— Bryce Courtenay

70. “More fights are lost by underestimating your opponent than by any other way.”

— Bryce Courtenay

71. “All children are flotsam driven by the ebb and flow of adult lives.”

— Bryce Courtenay

72. “As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.”

— Bryce Courtenay

73. “When man is brutalized in such a place like this, he is looking for small signs. The smallest sign that someone is worried for him is like a fire on the dark mountain. When a man knows somebody cares, he keeps some small place, a corner maybe of his soul, clean and lit.”

— Bryce Courtenay

74. “Always you should go to the source, to the face of the rock, to the beginning. The more you know, the more you can control your destiny.”

— Bryce Courtenay

75. “Man is the only animal who can store knowledge outside his body.”

— Bryce Courtenay

76. “No, not greedy, I just don’t like to gamble, but I do like to win and to win you have to make the odds negligible.”

— Bryce Courtenay

77. “Everything fits, Peekay. Nothing is unexplained. Nature is a chain reaction. One thing follows the other, everything is dependent on something else. The.”

— Bryce Courtenay

78. “PS Say always to yourself, First with the head and then with the heart, that’s how a man stays ahead from the start. H. G.”

— Bryce Courtenay

79. “Ja! I know what we shall do. You must put your hands like so,’ he placed his hands on his hips, ‘at once we will stand on one leg and say, “No matter what has happened bad, today I’m finished from being sad. Absoloodle!”

— Bryce Courtenay

80. “He had given me the power of one, one idea, one heart, one mind, one plan, one determination.”

— Bryce Courtenay

81. “I was a child of Africa, a white child to be sure, but nevertheless Africa’s child. The black breasts which had suckled me, and the dark hands which had bathed and rocked me, left me with a burden of obligation to resist the white power which would be the ultimate gift from those who now trained me.”

— Bryce Courtenay

82. “In music you must first do the exercises, always first the exercises. If you do the exercises goot then you have the foundations. You cannot build a good musician on a bad foundation. I think with this boxing business it is the same. Ja, I think this is true.”

— Bryce Courtenay

83. “If they do not respect your punch they simply keep going until they knock you down, man. A boxer must have respect.”

— Bryce Courtenay

84. “Hoppie had sensed my need to grow, my need to be assured that the world around me had not been specially arranged to bring about my undoing. He gave me a defence system and with it he gave me hope.”

— Bryce Courtenay

85. “I had long since built the walls around my ego which only the most persistent person would ever manage to climb.”

— Bryce Courtenay

86. “Yeah, sure, but we had sixty quid marked off for a profit anyway. That’s a damn good week’s work.’ ‘I know, but the whole thing lacked intellectual excitement. It didn’t depend on my wits.”

— Bryce Courtenay

87. “Hoppie squeezed my hand and laughed softly. ‘I reckon that was worth at least another two rounds, Peekay.’ Pausing in the dark outside the tent, he took me by the shoulders. ‘Never forget, Peekay, sometimes, very occasionally, you do your best boxing with your mouth.”

— Bryce Courtenay

88. “You must learn to box with your feet, small baas. A good boxer is like a dancer, he is still pretty to watch even if you look only at his feet.”

— Bryce Courtenay

89. “You see I am also Doctor of Music, it is all the same thing. I am too old and you are too young for Mister this or Professor that. You and me will not hide behind such a small importance. Just Peekay and Doc. I think this is a goot plan?”

— Bryce Courtenay

90. “The lawyer had pointed out that it was very much in my mother’s interests to clear our family name as the prattle tongues in town might well accuse her of neglect for having allowed me to roam the hills with a German spy.”

— Bryce Courtenay

91. “Knowing it might come but not knowing when meant that I would get an awful shock. The imagination is always the best torturer.”

— Bryce Courtenay

92. “Doc never took food for granted and would chew for ages before swallowing.”

— Bryce Courtenay

93. “Geel Piet taught me to anticipate the problems likely to occur in any situation and to review the answers to them long before disaster struck. His mind was a network of emergency plans. While small boys are not natural pessimists, he nevertheless taught me the value of a routine which, when practised a thousand times, becomes an automatic reaction to a crisis.”

— Bryce Courtenay

94. “I do not come from a nation of slaves, but I have been made a slave.”

— Bryce Courtenay

95. “The more you know, the more you can control your destiny.”

— Bryce Courtenay

96. “Country people know the sweat that goes into an ear of corn, a pail of milk, a churn of butter, bread warm from the oven and the eggs and bacon which sizzle in the breakfast frying pan. Food is hard earned and requires the proper degree of respect.”

— Bryce Courtenay

97. “Once I had been a regular chatterbox but school had changed all that. A person of my status was not expected to talk much, and besides, listening is a good camouflage. I soon discovered that it is also an art. You learn not simply to listen to what people say. It’s what people don’t say that is important.”

— Bryce Courtenay

98. “The more you know, the more you can control your destiny. Man is the only animal who can store knowledge outside his body. This has made him greater than the creatures around him. Everything has happened before, if you know what comes before then you know what happens now. 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

99. “As he had done in his swot spot in boxing, Hymie made us think and behave like winners. ‘Winners make their own luck but winners are also lucky,’ he said.”

— Bryce Courtenay

100. “Racism is a primary force of evil designed to destroy good men.”

— Bryce Courtenay