Top 80 Josiah Bancroft Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes to enjoy a scene fully, we must first retreat a little way.”

— Josiah Bancroft

2. “Senlin did not believe in that sort of love: sudden and selfish and insatiable. Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete.”

— Josiah Bancroft

3. “The mob does two things well: nothing and revolution. – I Sip a Cup of Wind by Jumet.”

— Josiah Bancroft

4. “The essential lesson of the zoetrope is this: movement, indeed all progress, even the passage of time, is an illusion. Life is the repetition of stillness.”

— Josiah Bancroft

5. “I’m pretty sure that’s what hope is. Stubbornness. Refusing to go down.”

— Josiah Bancroft

6. “We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.”

— Josiah Bancroft

7. “I suppose books are like a surgeon’s scalpel. The same blade that can kill when wielded by a fool can save lives in the right hands.”

— Josiah Bancroft

8. “We cannot raise a man up by lowering ourselves, no more than we can save a sunken ship by draining away the sea.”

— Josiah Bancroft

9. “Suits me. I’d rather be a nothing at the center of everything than a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.” She said this in her usual unguarded way. And without meaning to, she had described him exactly: a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.”

— Josiah Bancroft

10. “A man who is not suspicious of a philosophy that appeals to his nature is like the bull comforted by the rutted path that leads to the slaughterhouse. – I Sip a Cup of Wind by Jumet.”

— Josiah Bancroft

11. “Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete.”

— Josiah Bancroft

12. “I love a good scandal. There’s nothing more comforting than tut-tutting the public sins of another from the privacy of your own squalor.”

— Josiah Bancroft

13. “Don’t saw off your arm to feed a dog. You only have two arms, and the world is full of dogs.”

— Josiah Bancroft

14. “The only medicine for gout is moderation; the only cure for excess is charity.”

— Josiah Bancroft

15. “The rich “learn lessons.” The poor commit crimes. “Mistakes” are generally considered a mark of the middle class.”

— Josiah Bancroft

16. “I am the riddle in the mouth of the Sphinx. I am the slaver that chews the living chain. I am the farmer of dead seeds, the filler of holes. Who am I?” Senlin answered at a whisper: “Death.”

— Josiah Bancroft

17. “An earnest failure is superior to immaculate potential.”

— Josiah Bancroft

18. “I’m suspicious of people who are certain.”

— Josiah Bancroft

19. “We all have weaknesses. Not everyone has strengths.” “I.”

— Josiah Bancroft

20. “The human race will go marching into that conclusive dark, singing our ballads and telling our stories and embellishing our walls with loafing nudes because that is who we really are: creatures who’ve only begun to believe in the scarce beauty of ourselves, and just in time for the point to be moot.”

— Josiah Bancroft

21. “People only read what they already believe to be true, and if they encounter something that seems to disagree with their beliefs, they bend it into agreement, and if it cannot be bent, then they call it a conspiracy and cast it away!”

— Josiah Bancroft

22. “Memory is not like a box of stationery – easy to browse, reorder, and read. No, memories accumulate like leaves upon the forest floor. They are irregular and fragile. They crumble and break upon inspection. They turn to soil the deeper you go.”

— Josiah Bancroft

23. “With subjugation comes certainty. Liberty is full of gambles.”

— Josiah Bancroft

24. “Only people who go to bed early believe in happy endings. We night owls understand that happiness does not dwell in finales. It resides in anticipation, in revelry, and in worn-out welcomes. Endings are always sad.”

— Josiah Bancroft

25. “The human race will march into the darkness singing songs and telling stories because that is who we are and what we do.”

— Josiah Bancroft

26. “It is easier to accept who you’ve become than to recollect who you were.”

— Josiah Bancroft

27. “You are late, Headmaster.” “Impossible. Headmasters cannot be late,” he said. “The sun must be running fast.”

— Josiah Bancroft

28. “Never let a rigid itinerary discourage you from an unexpected adventure.”

— Josiah Bancroft

29. “If the law is malleable, Mr. Senlin, if it bends and conforms to man, then man will become resolute in his flaws. The law exists to give shape to man’s ideals. When you think about it, doesn’t mercy serve the wicked at the expense of the law?”

— Josiah Bancroft

30. “The mob does two things well: nothing and revolution.”

— Josiah Bancroft

31. “Sometimes, it was difficult to tell the difference between independence and imprisonment. The two could look an awful lot alike.”

— Josiah Bancroft

32. “But understanding nothing, or very little of the world, and having no desire to understand more than you already do, well, that invites entitlement. What was a privilege becomes a right. And that, I think, is dangerous.”

— Josiah Bancroft

33. “The only event I’m certain to attend is my funeral, and I hope to arrive very, very late.”

— Josiah Bancroft

34. “Senlin felt like an ambitious weed growing in the deep shade of old trees.”

— Josiah Bancroft

35. “If you lie loud and long enough, it eventually becomes the truth. – Oren Robinson of the Daily Reverie.”

— Josiah Bancroft

36. “At the round table of color, orange sits supreme. Orange is sublime. Orange is ablaze. And seated across from Lady Orange, we have Sir Purple. I ask you, is any color more vulgar? The word alone emerges like something from a lavatory. Purple. Plopple. It’s all prunes, liver spots, and ink stains. If I ever utter a word of praise for that wretched hue, please snatch my pen away and gore me with it.”

— Josiah Bancroft

37. “He understood that accusations made in wrath drew from the proof of emotions rather than the substance of facts, and as such were incontestable.”

— Josiah Bancroft

38. “If I ever get to the point where I can stand idly by while a child falls to his death, I don’t think I can claim to have priorities of any kind.”

— Josiah Bancroft

39. “The universe breathes in ragged breaths. The body dies. The fungus grows. The loam spreads. The tree roots. The forest burns. The cloud bursts. The flood drowns. The alluvium feeds the fields. In, out. In, out. There is no stasis, no stillness. The source of all misery lies in our insistence that tomorrow be like today. But if it were, if it ever were, it would spell the end of everything.”

— Josiah Bancroft

40. “Like it or not, we are pirates. Saying please and thank you doesn’t change that. There are no devils by degree, no gentlemen thieves. There’s just strong and weak, the willing and the dead.”

— Josiah Bancroft

41. “When you think little of yourself, everyone else’s opinion of you becomes more important than your own.”

— Josiah Bancroft

42. “Yes, I hear that people who suffer from brain damage are quite happy. That’s what I always wanted for you, Edith: for you to be happy, no matter how many blows to the head it takes.”

— Josiah Bancroft

43. “Iren looked the Captain and first mate up and down, taking in Edith’s split lip, the gory stains on her tattered scarf and the Captain’s shirt, the sling that pinned her mighty arm to her breast, the gash of blood on his forehead, the glowing dust that frosted them from hat to boot, and the strong smell of smoke wafting from their clothes. “How was the zoo?” she asked.”

— Josiah Bancroft

44. “Those who claim to be “ready for anything” are overpacked and invariably unprepared for the one obstacle every adventurer must eventually face – disappointment.”

— Josiah Bancroft

45. “Myth is the story of what we do not understand in ourselves.”

— Josiah Bancroft

46. “I’m counting on greed and egotism, forces that are as reliable as gravity.”

— Josiah Bancroft

47. “All I know is that, at the end of the day, dreams don’t matter, but neither does regret. We aren’t what we want or wish for. We are only what we do.”

— Josiah Bancroft

48. “She is imperfect, but absolutely peerless.”

— Josiah Bancroft

49. “Inevitably, invariably, eventually you will discover you are unprepared to make an informed choice. When in doubt, say, Yes. Yes is the eternal passport. Yes is the everlasting coin.”

— Josiah Bancroft

50. “The wonderful thing about regrets is that it’s never too late to have them.”

— Josiah Bancroft