Top 200 Gregory David Roberts Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I was thinking about another kind of river, one that runs through every one of us, no matter where we come from, all over the world. It’s the river of the heart, and the heart’s desire. It’s the pure, essential truth of what each one of us is, and can achieve.”

— Gregory David Roberts

152. “Jealousy has no mirror, and resentment has a tin ear for the truth.”

— Gregory David Roberts

153. “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

154. “I was too young, then, to know that dead lovers are the toughest rivals.”

— Gregory David Roberts

155. “Fear and guilt haunt the rich. Despair and humiliation haunt the poor.”

— Gregory David Roberts

156. “Religion is just a long competition to see who can design the silliest hat.”

— Gregory David Roberts

157. “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

158. “For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love; the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing; the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.”

— Gregory David Roberts

159. “The fully mature man or woman, he said, has about two seconds left to live.”

— Gregory David Roberts

160. “I know how hard it is to find the line between helping someone out, and helping someone in. I know that all suffer and die inside, again and again, from the addiction of one. And I know that sometimes, if love doesn’t harden itself, love doesn’t survive at all.”

— Gregory David Roberts

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

— Gregory David Roberts

162. “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

163. “Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.”

— Gregory David Roberts

164. “This is why killing and stealing are wrong – not because a book tells us they are wrong, or a law tells us they are wrong, or a spiritual guide tells us they are wrong, but because if everyone did them we would not move toward the ultimate complexity that is God, with the rest of the universe.”

— Gregory David Roberts

165. “It doesn’t matter what you did, or what you were. It doesn’t even matter what you are. It’s what you try to be that counts.”

— Gregory David Roberts

166. “Wherever you go in the world, in any society, it is always the same when it comes to questions of justice – We concentrate our laws, investigations, prosecutions, and punishments on how much crime is in the sin, rather than how much sin is in the crime. ” – Abdul Khader.”

— Gregory David Roberts

167. “I was free. Every day, when you’re on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.”

— Gregory David Roberts

168. “We know that crying isn’t a weakness, but a kind of strength.”

— Gregory David Roberts

169. “The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everythign has its cause and its meaning. 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

170. “Whatever you do, in the privacy of your own rain shower, is your own business.”

— Gregory David Roberts

171. “Anything that inhibits, impedes, or prevents this movement toward the Ultimate Complexity is evil. The wonderful thing about this definition of good and evil is that it is both objective and universally acceptable.”

— Gregory David Roberts

172. “It’s impossible to be really sad when you’re asleep. You can be happy and afraid and angry in your dreams, but you have to be wide awake to be sad, don’t you think?”

— Gregory David Roberts

173. “If you’d been born and raised in Palestine, you’d know that some people are born to suffer. And it never stops, for them. Not for a second. You’d know where real suffering comes from. It’s the same place where love and freedom and pride are born. And it’s the same place where those feelings and ideals die. That suffering never stops. We only pretend it does. We only tell ourselves it does, to make the kids stop whimpering in their sleep.”

— Gregory David Roberts

174. “You can’t serve God with a gun.”

— Gregory David Roberts

175. “A man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. then he has to earn her respect. then he has to cherish her trust. and then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That’s what it’s all about. That’s the most important thing in the world. That’s what a man is, Yaar. A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you do that, you’re not a man.”

— Gregory David Roberts

176. “You should let Jesus in your heart.’ ‘Jesus is in every heart, brother.’ ‘Are you serious?’ ‘Of course. I love that guy. Who doesn’t?’ ‘A lot of people don’t,’ he laughed. ‘Some people hate Jesus.’ ‘No. Brilliant mind, loving heart, significant penance: Jesus was the real deal. They might know Christians they don’t like, but nobody hates Jesus.”

— Gregory David Roberts

177. “Motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad.”

— Gregory David Roberts

178. “The man grinned back at me with that perfect sincerity we fear and call simple-minded.”

— Gregory David Roberts

179. “A lot of bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.”

— Gregory David Roberts

180. “We are collections of things that we find and experience and value and keep inside ourselves, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, and that collection of things is what we finally become.”

— Gregory David Roberts

181. “I couldn’t tell him that I felt too weak and beat up to climb a mountain: sometimes, all the guts you have is the guts you pretend, because you love someone too much to lose their respect.”

— Gregory David Roberts

182. “The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,′ he said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men – it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone – the noblest man alive or the most wicked – has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.”

— Gregory David Roberts

183. “Crime is stupid, lazy and weak. You can only exploit it and make money out of it.”

— Gregory David Roberts

184. “There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor.”

— Gregory David Roberts

185. “You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.”

— Gregory David Roberts

186. “It’s a fact of life on the run that you often love more people than you trust.”

— Gregory David Roberts

187. “What is civilisation? Idriss once remarked. It’s a woman, free to live as she wants.”

— Gregory David Roberts

188. “Time is the web, and Fate is the spider.”

— Gregory David Roberts

189. “Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid and angry we feel about it after.”

— Gregory David Roberts

190. “Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we’d done unclenched the clawed palm of what we’d become.”

— Gregory David Roberts

191. “And the true heart of us, our human kind, is that we’re connected, at our best, by purities of love found in no other creature.”

— Gregory David Roberts

192. “I also agree with Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject.”

— Gregory David Roberts

193. “Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things.”

— Gregory David Roberts

194. “If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves.”

— Gregory David Roberts

195. “Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument.”

— Gregory David Roberts

196. “I don’t like letters. Any dark past is a vampire, feeding on the blood of the living moment, and letters are the bats.”

— Gregory David Roberts

197. “But I couldn’t respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. 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

198. “Love unlived is a sin against life, and mourning is one of the ways we love. I felt it then, and I let it happen, the longing for him to return. The power in his eyes, and the pride when I did something he admired, and the love in his laugh. The longing: the longing for the lost.”

— Gregory David Roberts

199. “Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.”

— Gregory David Roberts

200. “There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you’re determined to dislike for no good reason.”

— Gregory David Roberts