Top 250 David Bowie Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.”

— David Bowie

Featured in: Clever Quotes

2. “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”

— David Bowie

3. “If we could be heroes, if just for one day.”

— David Bowie

Featured in: Artist Quotes, Quotes About Songs

4. “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.”

— David Bowie

Featured in: Future Quotes

5. “I’m a thinker not a talker.”

— David Bowie

6. “Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.”

— David Bowie

7. “Turn and face the strange.”

— David Bowie

8. “There’s a starman waiting in the sky, he’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds.”

— David Bowie

Featured in: Music Quotes, Space Quotes, Sky Quotes

9. “Ground control to Major Tom.”

— David Bowie

Featured in: Space Quotes, Quotes About Songs

10. “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.”

— David Bowie

11. “Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.”

— David Bowie

12. “I don’t make changes to confuse anyone. I’m just searching. That’s what causes me to change. I’m just searching for myself.”

— David Bowie

13. “I’ve come to the realizations that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing half the time.”

— David Bowie

14. “You can neither win nor lose if you don’t run the race.”

— David Bowie

15. “Keep your ’lectric eye on me babe Put your ray gun to my head Press your space face close to mine, love Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!”

— David Bowie

16. “Let the children use it, let the children lose it, let all the children boogie.”

— David Bowie

17. “If you come from art, you’ll always be art.”

— David Bowie

18. “The minute you know you’re on safe ground, you’re dead.”

— David Bowie

19. “And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.”

— David Bowie

20. “You’d like to know me well, but I’ve got things inside my head that even I can’t face.”

— David Bowie

21. “Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.”

— David Bowie

22. “Speak in extremes, it’ll save you time.”

— David Bowie

23. “I’m afraid of Americans.”

— David Bowie

24. “Wham, bam, thank you Ma’am.”

— David Bowie

25. “For here, I’m sitting in a tin can, far above the world. Planet earth is blue, and there is nothing I can do.”

— David Bowie

26. “I’ll place my love beneath the stars.”

— David Bowie

27. “Make the best of every moment. We’re not evolving. We’re not going anywhere.”

— David Bowie

28. “Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you’re pretty much on the way out...”

— David Bowie

29. “No more free steps to heaven.”

— David Bowie

30. “This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll; this is genocide.”

— David Bowie

31. “I’ll stick with you baby for a thousand years.”

— David Bowie

32. “Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold.”

— David Bowie

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

33. “Nothing prepared me for your smile.”

— David Bowie

34. “Trust nothing but your own experience.”

— David Bowie

35. “If it works, it’s out of date.”

— David Bowie

36. “And it’s always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn’t want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you’re dead as an artist.”

— David Bowie

37. “I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity...”

— David Bowie

38. “I have to take total control myself. I can’t let anybody else do anything, for I find that I can do things better for me. I don’t want to get other people playing with what they think that I’m trying to do.”

— David Bowie

39. “Don’t let me hear you say life takes you nowhere, angel.”

— David Bowie

40. “You can’t stand still on one point for your entire life.”

— David Bowie

41. “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from.”

— David Bowie

42. “I read the news today, oh boy.”

— David Bowie

43. “I had enormous self-image problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. It’s exactly what I do now, except I enjoy it now. I’m not driven like I was in my twenties. I was driven to get through life very quickly.”

— David Bowie

44. “I am a moderately good singer. I am not a great singer but I can interpret a song, which I don’t think is quite the same as singing it.”

— David Bowie

45. “If I never wake again, I certainly will have lived while I was alive.”

— David Bowie

46. “There’s just some dysfunctionalism with artists. There are good things and bad things about being an artist, and the good thing is, sometimes you get an inside line on what’s really happening. You develop these strange antennae that clue you in to what’s really going on.”

— David Bowie

47. “Fame puts you there where things are hollow.”

— David Bowie

48. “I think music should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium.”

— David Bowie

49. “I’m drawn between the light and dark.”

— David Bowie

50. “Rebel, rebel, you’ve torn your dress. Rebel, rebel, your face is a mess. Rebel, rebel, how could they know? Hot tramp, I love you so.”

— David Bowie