Top 200 Gregory David Roberts Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “People haven’t stopped believing in love. They haven’t stopped wanting to be in love. They just don’t believe in a happy ending anymore. They still believe in love, and falling in love, but they know now that... they know that romances almost never end as well as they begin.”

— Gregory David Roberts

102. “The lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight.”

— Gregory David Roberts

103. “The heart doesn’t know how to quit, because it doesn’t know how to lie.”

— Gregory David Roberts

104. “Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.”

— Gregory David Roberts

105. “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

106. “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

107. “Glory belongs to God, of course; that’s what the word really means. And you can’t serve God with a gun.”

— Gregory David Roberts

108. “Love unlived is a sin against life, and mourning is one of the ways we love.”

— Gregory David Roberts

109. “Yes. You’re a good listener. That’s dangerous, because it’s so hard to resist. Being listened to – really listened to – is the second-best thing in the world.”

— Gregory David Roberts

110. “No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.”

— Gregory David Roberts

111. “Love the truth that you find in the hearts of others. Always listen to the voice of love in your own heart.”

— Gregory David Roberts

112. “I can’t stand politicians. A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.”

— Gregory David Roberts

113. “When we’re young, we think that suffering is something that’s done to us. When we get older- when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another-we know that real suffering is measured by what’s taken away from us.”

— Gregory David Roberts

114. “Regret is a ghost of love. Regret is a nicer self that we send into the past from time to time, even though we know it’s too late to change what we said, or did. We do it because it’s human: a thing of our kind. We do it because we care, drawn by threads of shame that only fray and wither in the sea of regret.”

— Gregory David Roberts

115. “And while a small measure of bitterness might’ve protected me from time to time, as it sometimes does, I’ve learned that sweet memories don’t walk through cynical doors.”

— Gregory David Roberts

116. “People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.”

— Gregory David Roberts

117. “It is always a fool’s mistake, Didier once said to me, to be alone with someone you shouldn’t have loved.”

— Gregory David Roberts

118. “The same legends also carry warnings that such fated love may, sometimes, be the possession and the obsession of one, and only one, of the two souls twinned by destiny. But wisdom, in one sense, is the opposite of love. Love survives in us precisely because it isn’t wise.”

— Gregory David Roberts

119. “The worst things that people do to us always make us feel ashamed. The worst things that people do always strike at the part of us that wants to love the world. And a tiny part of the shame we feel, when we’re violated, is shame at being human.”

— Gregory David Roberts

120. “The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.”

— Gregory David Roberts

121. “The Big Questions only have small answers, and the Big Answers can only be found through small questions.”

— Gregory David Roberts

122. “No, Lin! This is India. Nobody can take his clothes off, not even to wash his bodies. This is India. Nobody is ever naked in India. And especially, nobody is naked without clothes.”

— Gregory David Roberts

123. “The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.”

— Gregory David Roberts

124. “One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward universal ultimate complexity?”

— Gregory David Roberts

125. “The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish. We danced in moonlight on the balcony that night, Oleg and I, and we sang and shouted and laughed, hardening ourselves to what we’d done in life, and what we’d lost. And the moon graced two fallen fools, on a fallen day, with sunlight purified by a mirror in the sky, made of stone.”

— Gregory David Roberts

126. “Loyalty is something you need for things you don’t love enough. When you love enough, loyalty isn’t even a question.”

— Gregory David Roberts

127. “The choices we make are branches in the tree of possibility.”

— Gregory David Roberts

128. “One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.”

— Gregory David Roberts

129. “The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can’t miss.”

— Gregory David Roberts

130. “Most loves are like that, from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while you start throwing people out – your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it.”

— Gregory David Roberts

131. “Every human heartbeat, he’s said many times, is a universe of possibilities.”

— Gregory David Roberts

132. “The wonder isn’t that love finds us, as strange and fated and mystical as that is. The wonder is that even when we never find it, even when love waits in the wings of dream too long, even when love doesn’t knock on the door, or leave messages, or put flowers in our hands, so many of us never stop believing in love.”

— Gregory David Roberts

133. “Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.”

— Gregory David Roberts

134. “Arrogance is pride’s calling card, and crowds everything with Self. Gratitude is humility’s calling card, and is the space left inside for love.”

— Gregory David Roberts

135. “A heart filled with greed, pride or hateful feelings is not free.”

— Gregory David Roberts

136. “The word family is derived from the word famulus, meaning a servant, and in its early usage, familia, it literally meant the servants of a household. In its essence, the longing for family, and the ravenousness that the loss of family creates in us, isn’t just for belonging: it’s for the grace that abides in serving those we love.”

— Gregory David Roberts

137. “Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way – the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason – and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.”

— Gregory David Roberts

138. “Our decisions become narratives: fated choices that unknowably change the course of the living river. In the present, where decisions and connections are made, Fate waits on the riverbank of Story, leaving us to our mistakes and miracles, because it’s our will alone that leads us to one or the other.”

— Gregory David Roberts

139. “And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.”

— Gregory David Roberts

140. “Indian actors know how to shout with the eyes.”

— Gregory David Roberts

141. “Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black.”

— Gregory David Roberts

142. “Khaderbhai once said that if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom. I hope he wasn’t right about that. I hope good envy takes you further than that, because a lifetime has passed since that day at the wire, and I still envy Anand’s calm communion with fate, and I long for it with all my flawed and striving heart.”

— Gregory David Roberts

143. “Time, too, will die, just as we do, when the universe dies, and is born again. Time’s a living thing, just as we are, with birth, longevity, and extinction. Time has a heartbeat, but it isn’t ours, no matter how much of ourselves we sacrifice to it. We don’t need Time. Time needs us. Even Time loves company.”

— Gregory David Roberts

144. “A business suit, Didier once said to me, is nothing but a military uniform, stripped of its honour. And.”

— Gregory David Roberts

145. “Karma’s a hammer, not a feather.”

— Gregory David Roberts

146. “Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey.”

— Gregory David Roberts

147. “The statement I do not hate you is a poem of passionate love.”

— Gregory David Roberts

148. “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

149. “And hope, that ancient seed, redeems the heart it feeds. The heartbeat of any conscious now is poised on the same choice that hope gives all of us, between shadows of the past, and the bright, blank page of any new day.”

— Gregory David Roberts

150. “I began to see how deep the well of her loving was, and how much her happiness and confidence depended on drawing that love into the light, and sharing it. And love was beautiful in her. It was a clear sky she gave us with those eyes, and a summer morning with her smile.”

— Gregory David Roberts