Top 200 Gregory David Roberts Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 5

51. “Every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.”

— Gregory David Roberts

52. “That’s how they manage to live together, a billion of them, in reasonable peace. They are not perfect, of course. They know how to fight and lie and cheat each other, and all the things that all of us do. But more than any other people in the world, the Indians know how to love one another.”

— Gregory David Roberts

53. “Friendship is an Algebra test that nobody passes.”

— Gregory David Roberts

54. “Any good thing that dies inside can rise again, if you want it hard enough. The heart doesn’t know how to quit, because it doesn’t know how to lie.”

— Gregory David Roberts

55. “The wrong thing, for the right reasons.”

— Gregory David Roberts

56. “Powerful people have no regrets.”

— Gregory David Roberts

57. “The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love.”

— Gregory David Roberts

58. “Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.”

— Gregory David Roberts

59. “Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever...”

— Gregory David Roberts

60. “The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.”

— Gregory David Roberts

61. “The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly, and with the eyes open.”

— Gregory David Roberts

62. “The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.”

— Gregory David Roberts

63. “I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.”

— Gregory David Roberts

64. “You are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.”

— Gregory David Roberts

65. “There’s too much love in the world. Sometimes I think that’s what heaven is – – a place where everybody’s happy because nobody loves anybody else, ever.”

— Gregory David Roberts

66. “We are made out of stars, you and I.”

— Gregory David Roberts

67. “It isn’t a secret, unless keeping it hurts.”

— Gregory David Roberts

68. “People say that love is the best thing in the world not power. But they are wrong. Love is the opposite of power and that’s why we fear it so much.”

— Gregory David Roberts

69. “More dreams are realised and extinguished in Bombay than any other place in India.”

— Gregory David Roberts

70. “I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can’t give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.”

— Gregory David Roberts

71. “When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, we call the dream a nightmare.”

— Gregory David Roberts

72. “Some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you...”

— Gregory David Roberts

73. “Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.”

— Gregory David Roberts

74. “Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash, the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote. But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth.”

— Gregory David Roberts

75. “A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.”

— Gregory David Roberts

76. “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever known. It was the beauty of a desert at dawn: a loveliness that filled my eyes, and crushed me into silent, unbreathing awe.”

— Gregory David Roberts

77. “Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they’re not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve.”

— Gregory David Roberts

78. “There’s no heart like the Indian heart.”

— Gregory David Roberts

79. “Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it’s the other way around.”

— Gregory David Roberts

80. “Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong – that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.”

— Gregory David Roberts

81. “But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled.”

— Gregory David Roberts

82. “Fear is a wolf on a chain, only dangerous when you set it free. Sorrow exhausts itself in the net of forgetting. Anger, for all its fury, can be killed by a smile. Only hope goes on forever, because hope doesn’t belong to us: it belongs to our ancestors, the first of our kind, whose brave love for one another gave us most of the good that we are.”

— Gregory David Roberts

83. “The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well.”

— Gregory David Roberts

84. “You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.”

— Gregory David Roberts

85. “They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us unscreamed. That’s where loves, like elephants, drag themselves to die. It’s the place where pride allows itself to cry.”

— Gregory David Roberts

86. “The only kingdom that makes any man a king is the kingdom of his own soul. The only power that has any real meaning is the power to better the world.”

— Gregory David Roberts

87. “Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it’s exactly like love in three ways: it’s pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.”

— Gregory David Roberts

88. “None of us lie or guard our secrets when we sing, and India is a nation of singers whose first love is the kind of song we turn to when crying just isn’t enough.”

— Gregory David Roberts

89. “The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There’s nowhere else in the world where that’s quite so true.”

— Gregory David Roberts

90. “I think wisdom is over-rated. Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it. I’d rather be clever than wise, any day. Most of the wise people I know give me a headache, but I never met a clever man or woman I didn’t like.”

— Gregory David Roberts

91. “The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.”

— Gregory David Roberts

92. “In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.”

— Gregory David Roberts

93. “The beautiful courage of us, the hope that defines our kind, is that we go on, no matter how much life wounds us. We walk. We face the sea and the wind and the salted truth of death, and we go on.”

— Gregory David Roberts

94. “I don’t know what frightens me more.”

— Gregory David Roberts

95. “We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.”

— Gregory David Roberts

96. “Be true to love where ever you find it, and be true to yourself and everything that you really are.”

— Gregory David Roberts

97. “I think that we all, each one of us, we all have to earn our future.”

— Gregory David Roberts

98. “Of course I wanted to know. I was a writer. I wanted to know everything.”

— Gregory David Roberts

99. “Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.”

— Gregory David Roberts

100. “Shantaram is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to Shantaram, the first a prequel.”

— Gregory David Roberts