Top 200 Gregory David Roberts Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “If you get in tune with the tendency field, through expanding and exploring the set of positive characteristics within yourself, the tendency field responds with constant energy, and affirmations. If you work against the tendency field, by being negative, unfair, unloving, and unconscious of the truth, you weaken your connection to the tendency field, and you experience existential dread, no matter how rich or famous or powerful you are.”

— Gregory David Roberts

102. “If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke.”

— Gregory David Roberts

103. “The truth is that the man I am was born in those moments, as I stood near the flood sticks with my face lifted to the chrismal rain. Shantaram. The better man that, slowly, and much too late, I began to be.”

— Gregory David Roberts

104. “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

105. “A man must love his bear.”

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

113. “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

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. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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 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

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

— Gregory David Roberts

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

129. “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

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

— Gregory David Roberts

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Gregory David Roberts

141. “The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards. The rest of us, all six billion of us, do pretty much what we are told!”

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

143. “Happiness is a myth,’ Karla snapped back angrily. ‘It was invented to make us buy things.”

— Gregory David Roberts

144. “I’d learned more about her in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.”

— Gregory David Roberts

145. “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

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

— Gregory David Roberts

147. “But survival means more than simply being alive. It’s not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can’t be said to have survived it.”

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

149. “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

150. “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