Top 40 Derren Brown Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.”

— Derren Brown

2. “Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practise anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.”

— Derren Brown

3. “We’re terrible at realising what goes on in other people’s heads because we are trapped inside our own.”

— Derren Brown

4. “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things.”

— Derren Brown

5. “We forget our health and comfort and notice a pinching shoe. Much of living well is detaching from our boring stories of pain and shifting focus.”

— Derren Brown

6. “The single most valuable human trait, the one quality every schoolchild and adult should be taught to nurture, is, quite simply, kindness.”

— Derren Brown

7. “The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out one’s least impressive qualities.”

— Derren Brown

8. “You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.”

— Derren Brown

9. “I control the conditions so my testers become my testees.”

— Derren Brown

10. “Magic is a performance, and a performance should have an honesty, a relevance and a resonance if it is to be offered to spectators without insulting them.”

— Derren Brown

11. “Aristotle also felt strongly that virtue requires action; mere noble intentions are not enough.”

— Derren Brown

12. “Magic is not inherently anything. It is what you sell it as.”

— Derren Brown

13. “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things.’1 In other words, it is not events out there that cause our problems but rather our reactions to them: the stories we tell ourselves.”

— Derren Brown

14. “Liberating but hard to remember we’re just bit-parts in the lives of people we know, who care very little for our secrets.”

— Derren Brown

15. “Alan Watts, who gave us the image of trying to wrap up water with string, made the point that it is absurd to work at something you don’t enjoy, purely to make more money to be able to live longer and continue doing something you don’t like.”

— Derren Brown

16. “It is hard to think about your past without tidying it up into a kind of story: one in which you are cast as the hero or victim. Invariably we ignore the regular dice-rolls of chance or random luck; successful high-flyers are typically prone to ignoring the interplay of blind fortune when they credit their career trajectories to their canny business sense or brute self-belief. We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day.”

— Derren Brown

17. “Forget motivation; just get used to doing things straight away.”

— Derren Brown

18. “I’d rather cut off my own balls with blunt bacon scissors than host a dinner party.”

— Derren Brown

19. “1. If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.8.”

— Derren Brown

20. “Schopenhauer wrote, ‘Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

— Derren Brown

21. “He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.”

— Derren Brown

22. “Everything worthwhile in your life draws its meaning from the fact you will die.”

— Derren Brown

23. “If someone does not have a specific charity they would like to donate to, that’s OK. An undesignated donation would be split up evenly amongst all the charities supported by the Annapolis Area Complex.”

— Derren Brown

24. “When you start to build a serious wardrobe, the navy blazer is the very first piece you should choose. It can be a building block for an entire work and casual wardrobe.”

— Derren Brown

25. “Believe in yourself, blame yourself.”

— Derren Brown

26. “We avoid pain, seek comfort, and become bored. To counter that boredom, we may choose to engage in distracting or competitive activities that bring new forms of stress into our lives.”

— Derren Brown

27. “Anger certainly seems to have an evolutionary basis. It serves a social purpose: displays of anger encourage others to change their behaviour and thus work to stop people transgressing societal rules that keep us cohabiting comfortably. If we neither felt nor exhibited annoyance, we would become ‘slavish’, in Aristotle’s words, and an easy target for exploitation.”

— Derren Brown

28. “Dull magic is a collection of tricks: great magic should sting.”

— Derren Brown

29. “To grow up is to endure the equivocal, to permit the ambiguous.”

— Derren Brown

30. “In magic we have a variety of “uses” for our art beyond magic itself, which reminds me of the notion of art therapy. The rendering of art inferior to therapy is an interesting one: interesting in the sense that it makes me want to vomit angrily.”

— Derren Brown

31. “Seems the seance has become the most complained-about show. It received 700 complaints. I might add that the prospect of me blowing my head off on live TV last year attracted only twenty. Fair enough, I suppose.”

— Derren Brown

32. “We might never rid ourselves of a lingering anxiety regarding our death; this is a kind of tax we pay in return for self-awareness.”

— Derren Brown

33. “I’m a big fan of parrots – I think they’re fascinating creatures. Many of them live for longer than us humans and it’s interesting to me the way they learn to mimic human voices even though they don’t really comprehend what they’re saying.”

— Derren Brown

34. “Few kids seek to learn a skill specifically designed to impress people unless they feel less than impressive themselves.”

— Derren Brown

35. “To impress people as much as we would wish, we would first need to successfully adopt each of their value systems.”

— Derren Brown

36. “When others inspire us, they tend to do so through the clear expression of these sketchy, adumbrated thoughts we ourselves have known but never had the perspicacity for formulate with certainty.”

— Derren Brown

37. “The science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke gave us the law ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

— Derren Brown

38. “Our fascination with weather: its caprices and changes as an antidote to the eternal repetition of daily life; a helpful illusion of novelty.”

— Derren Brown

39. “A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.”

— Derren Brown

40. “Many atheists might proudly proclaim that our lives have no ultimate meaning, yet the business of finding significance in one’s life is perhaps the most important part of being human. When we drift into a life without meaning, we soon become a pack of symptoms and pathologies; and without any feeling of significance, many choose to end their lives altogether.”

— Derren Brown

41. “I would like a bit of me – that’s how I put my back out!”

— Derren Brown

42. “The meaning of life,’ wrote Kafka, reputedly, ’is that it stops.”

— Derren Brown

43. “As Joseph Campbell wrote about middle age, ‘There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.”

— Derren Brown

44. “The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know;.”

— Derren Brown

45. “The Greeks understood this relationship between man and the machinations of the universe. Their tragedies taught us that we need to learn raw humility in the fickle face of fate. Tragic heroes marched out into the world full of pride, biased vision and a mighty capacity for self-deception. Fate ultimately brought them to their knees. The lesson for us is not that we are doomed but that we must reassess the control we think we wield.”

— Derren Brown

46. “There is at the heart of Romanticism an urge to withdraw into oneself in order to then transcend the boundaries of that self and connect with nature and the larger order.”

— Derren Brown

47. “You should live in the moment’ is as unhelpful an imperative as ‘You should believe in yourself and secure the future you want’. The only ‘should’ we need ever take on board is that we ‘should’ get on with our lives without hurting other people.”

— Derren Brown

48. “WE GENERALLY FEEL defined by our past. Our past, however, is a story that we tell ourselves in the present.”

— Derren Brown