Quotes from Bryce Courtenay

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Never take advice from a donkey.

If I were king of the world there wouldn't be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.

Dare your genius to walk the wildest unknown ways.