Bryce Courtenay Quotes

Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.

First with the head, then with the heart.

. . . besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.

Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.

Always listen to yourself... It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention.

I have found in life that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end.

The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, ofen well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better.

I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.

First with the head, then with the heart, you'll be ahead from the start.

Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do.

When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.

But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope.

Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance. -Doc

Pride is holding your head up high when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it.

Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow, and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky. The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous. Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.

Absoloodle not

Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom!

sometimes in life doing what we shouldn't do is the emergency

You've got to be quick on your feet in this world if you want to survive. Though once you know the rules, it is not too hard to play the game.

Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.

Sometimes, very occasionally, you do your best boxing with your mouth.

In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also.

It's nothing to be ashamed of. There comes a time in everything when you don't know something.

You can't go feeding your hate on the past, it's not natural.

Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.

Never take advice from a donkey.

It's good to be a little frightened. It's good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp. In the fight game, the head rules the heart. But in the end the heart is the boss.

It is better just to get on with the business of living and minding your own business and maybe, if God likes the way you do things, he may just let you flower for a day or a night. But don't go pestering and begging and telling him all your stupid little sins, that way you will spoil his day.

Let me conclude by saying in my experience the glittering prizes in life come more to those who persevere despite setback and disappointment than they do to the exceptionally gifted who, with the confidence of the talents bestowed upon them, often pursue the tasks leading to success with less determination.

. . . God is too busy making the sun come up and go down and watching so the moon floats just right in the sky to be concerned with color . . . only man wants always God should be there to condemn this one and save that one. Always it is man who wants to make heaven and hell. God is too busy training the bees to make honey and every morning opening up all the new flowers for business.

The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, th think through the truth and not be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost.

Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been

I wish to cup knowledge in my hand and drink it as one drinks water by the side of the stream.

what is a german? to say a man is a german, what is that? does it tell you if he is a good man? or a bad man? no, my friend, it tells you nothing about a man to say he is german. a man must think what he is inside. what he is on the outside, how can this matter?

How I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed.

Life is all beginnings and ends. Nothing stays the same, lad.

I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country.

Mediocrity is the best camouflage known to man.

The imagination is always the best torturer.

Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.

As is so often the case with a legend, every incident has two possible interpretations, the plausible and the one that is molded to suit the making of the myth. Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma. As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.

Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.

First with the head and then with the heart.

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no longer exist as a people.

I spoke the language the sentences that had lied their grandfathers and sent their grandmothers to the worlds first concentration camps.

The Tragedy of the human condition is that the very things that make us interesting and culturally important and progressively brilliant are our differences; and these are also the principle reasons for our prejudices

every man is an island and at the same time also robinson crusoe.

It's not what a man does, it's what a man is that counts!

When a man knows somebody cares he keeps some small place, a corner maybe of his soul clean and lit.

Peu importe le rêve, qu'il soit ambitieux ou grandiose, quelqu'un finira par le réaliser. Autant que ce soit vous.

In this world are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for man to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation. The searcher after truth must search with humanity. Ruthless logic is the sign of a limited mind. The truth can only add to the sum of what you know, while a harmless mystery left unexplored often adds to the meaning of life. When a truth is not so important, it is better left as a mystery.

The rich become rich by taking, and the poor by giving.

sweet potatoes in their jackets have a large comfort value built into them

Generosity overpowers greed.

I felt clean, all the bone-beaked loneliness birds banished, their rocky nests turned to river stones. Cool, clear water bubbled over them, streams in the desert.

Luck is a curious companion, it comes to those who believe they hold it, and is an elusive servant to those who doubt they possess it.

I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.

ou can't go feeding your hate on the past, it's not natural.

Boldness, at first a stranger to be treated with caution, soon becomes a friend, then a partner, and finally taken for granted, as is the daily relationship between married people.

that

It's who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone.

In this world there are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for man to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation.

my only desire is to teach the word o' man and leave the word o' Gawd to the pulpit men

... in each of us there is a flame that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it burns within us, we cannot be destroyed.

He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers".

I learned that the greatest camouflage of all is consistency. If you do something often enough and at the same time in the same way, you become invisible.

Nothing is unexplained. Nature is a chain reaction. Everything is dependent on something else. The smallest is as important as the largest

The smile, madame, is used by humans to hide the truth, the artist is only interested to reveal the truth.

Over all this lay Hoppie's dictum: First with the head and then with the heart. Winning was something you worked at intellectually, emotion clouds the mind and is its natural enemy. This made for a loneliness which often let me aching to share an emotion but equally afraid that if I did so I would reveal a weakness which could later be used against me.

The mind is the athlete; the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better. Hoppie's dictum to me, "First with the head and then with the heart," was more than simply mixing brains with guts. It meant thinking well beyond the powers of normal concentration and then daring your courage to follow your thoughts.

Peekay, if not now it will be never again.

Life has a habit of going on.

It was the first time I'd realised that the giant in 'Jack and the Beanstalk' was an Afrikaner.

First with the head, and then with the heart, that way small can beat big.

Mix the head with the heart, and you're ahead from the start.

And if you should be there and you see this beautiful cactus blossom painted silver by the moon and laughing up at the stars, this, Peekay, is heaven.

without courage, there is no luck and no hope. He who dares, wins.

Man is the only animal who can store knowledge outside his body.

The more you know, the more you can control your destiny.

Morrie, as usual, had made his point: good conversational debate is an end to itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human. p385

It seemed certain now that small could defeat big. All it took was brains and skills and heart and a perfect plan.

I had learned the most important rule in winning-keep thinking.

Well, you know my theory of a winner. Find one winner and you can build everything around him?

shoulder

But I started to realize that it doesn't begin like this, that anybody can be the target for prejudice, all you have to be is "too" something . Too short, too fat, too clever, too big, too small, too slow, too new, "too different" from what others think of as normal.

The time we are given for parenting is so short, passes so quickly and is jumbled up with so many other priorities and disruptions that, in the end, we come to doubt that we used it in the best interests of our children.

By bedtime Nanny was at my side as usual, arriving with a large sweet potato, its tummy open with a spoon sticking out of the middle, tiny wisps of steam curling upwards and condensing on the handle. There is something about a sweet potato that cheers you up when you are low and it celebrates with you when you are happy. Sweet potatoes baked in their jackets have a very large comfort factor built into them.

Cleverness is a false presumption', Doc had explained, 'it is like being a natural skater, you are so busy doing tricks to impress that you do not see where the thin ice is and before you know, poof! You are in deep, ice-cold water frozen like a dead herring. Intelligence is a harder gift, for this you must work, you must practise it, challenge it and maybe towards the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow whereas intelligence is the substance.

It is not possible for a man to touch the heart of the negro man’s music when he cannot feel it through his fingers.

Humans best survive when they are given a purpose; a common enemy to defeat, revenge to wreak or a dream to cling to.

While being beaten by the other kids encouraged me to learn a new language, it wasn't doing my confidence a lot of good.

The joy of a small town lies in its unchanging nature.

Then I felt like having a piss and I did that

Onoshobishobi Ingelosi. . . shobi. . . shobi. . . Ingelosi, the piano notes enunciated as clearly as if the people themselves were singing it.

all i know about the bible is that wherever it goes there's trouble. the only time i ever heard of it being useful was when a stretcher bearer i was with at the battle of dundee told me that he'd once gotten hit by a mauser bullet in the heart, only he was carrying a bible in his tunic pocket and the bible saved his life. he told me that ever since he'd always carried a bible into battle with him and he fled perfectly safe because god was in his breast pocket. we were out looking for a sergeant of the worcesters and three troopers who were wounded while out on a reconnaissance and were said to be holed up in a dry donga. in truth, i think my partner felt perfectly safe because the boer mausers were estimated by the british artillery to be accurate to eight hundred yards and we were at least twelve hundred yards from enemy lines. alas, nobody bothered to tell the boers about the shortcomings of their brand-new german rifle and the mauser bullet hit him straight between the eyes...which goes to prove, you can always depend on british army information not to be accurate, the boers to be deadly accurate, and the bible to be good for matters of the heart but hopeless for those of the head, and finally, that god is in nobody's pocket.

What evidence do you have that the black people in your country are ready to rise against the regime? A true revolution begins from the soil, from the grass roots. It is the final cry of despair from the ground up. Have you heard the cry “freedom"?

The Oxwagon Guard was very similar to the Ku Klux Klan only it included the English in with Jews and Kaffirs as the corrupters of pure Afrikanerdom. The war had helped them to grow into a powerful secret society which would one day become the covert ruler of South Africa and the major influence in declaring it a republic. I heard all this from Snotnose whose father was a member.

The rapacious white tribe who were arriving in increasing numbers, not only as convicts but also as settlers, wanted to own everything they touched. They slashed and burned the wilderness so that they might graze their sheep and grow their corn. They erected fences around the land they now called their own and which henceforth they were prepared to defend with muskets and sometimes even their lives. They built church steeples and prison walls and homes of granite hewn from the virgin rock and timber cut from the umbrageous mountain forests. They possessed everything upon the island, the wild beasts that grazed upon its surface, the birds that flew over it, the fish that swam in its rushing river torrents and the barking seals resting in the quiet bays and secluded inlets. Everything they thought worthwhile was attached to the notion of ownership.

The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, often well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete; the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better. Hoppie's dictum to me, "First with the head and then with the heart," was more than simply mixing brains with guts. It meant thinking well beyond the powers of normal concentration and then daring your courage to follow your thoughts.

The thing about fires most people don’t realise is the noise. It’s deafening so even if you shout, you can’t be heard three feet away. You can never quite get used to the fury of it, it’s like a mighty roar of anger that just keeps going. I suppose flame is beautiful, the way it leaps into the air like it’s free to do what it wants. Other elements are also free and I guess the sea can be pretty awesome, wind too, and lightning, but fire has a mind and a determination. You don’t see it as a blind raging thing, which I suppose it is, but something that attacks and thinks and changes tactics. It has a malevolence that uses surprise, dirty tricks, cunning. You get to think of it as someone, not something, and it’s someone you have to beat, but right from the start you don’t like your chances because it’s so big and unpredictable and can do so much harm.