Gregory David Roberts

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Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Life
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you can't kill love. you can't even kill it with hate. you can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. you can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. 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
Collection: Regret
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The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Games
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If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Fate
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There are no mistakes. Only new paths to explore.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Mistake
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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
Collection: Winning
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If you make your heart into a weapon, you end up using it on yourself.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Heart
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Love is the opposite of power. That's why we fear it so much.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Love Is
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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
Collection: Eye
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If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it?
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Pain
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There's a kind of luck that's not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that's not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Inspiration
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Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Teacher
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The past reflects eternally between two mirrors - the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Dark
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I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Crush
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Food is music to the body, music is food to the heart.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Heart
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The choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Hate
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It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Dream
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The world is run by one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Running
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I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Thinking
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Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Tired
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One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Brave
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Be true to love where ever you find it, and be true to yourself and everything that you really are.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Be True To Yourself
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Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Inspirational
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For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested and loyalty. But there is not test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Loyalty
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The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They're wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn't a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and we crash like fallen trees when we cry.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Rip
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I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Crush
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You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Differences
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Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Shantaram
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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
Collection: Play
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Sometimes you have to lose to win
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Winning
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Love is a one-way street. Love, like respect isn't something you get; it's something you give
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Love Is
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Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog? You know, the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river, because the scorpion promises not to sting him. And then the scorpion stings the frog, half way across the river. The drowning frog asks him why he did it, when they'll both drown, and the scorpion says that he's a scorpion, and it's his nature to sting.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Rivers
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Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Done
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Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: I Love You
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There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Clever
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The real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it. - Karla
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Real
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A wise man once told me- he’s a muslim by the way- that he has more in common with a jew than he does a fanatic of his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or a Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic of his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a ration, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic of his own religion
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Christian
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Praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can't defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: People
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I think the future is like anything else that's important. It has to be earned. If we don't earn it, we don't have a future at all. And if we don't earn it, we don't deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that's probably what love is - a way of earning the future.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Past
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There's a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defence reflex-a warning sound that frightened potential predators away from the mouth of the cave when our lower-paleolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep. That group of nomads, cameleers, sheep and goat herders, farmers, and guerilla fighters lent credibility to the idea, for they snored so thunderously and with such persistent ferocity through the long, cold night that they would've frightened a pride of ravenous lions into scattering like startled mice.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Sleep
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Fate always gives you two choices, the one you should take, and the one you do.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Fate
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Some loves are like that. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, & your self-respect & independence. After a while you start throwing people out - friends, everyone you know. & it's still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, & you know it's going to take you down with it. I've seen that happen to a lot of people. I think that's why I'm sick of love. - Karla
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Heart
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I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt. And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Hurt
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when you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Judging
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But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Baby
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Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch, as the skin of a woman's thigh. No flower, feather or fabric, can match that velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in any other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It's a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Beautiful
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The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time into its own future. I liked it.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Sports
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Justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. 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
Collection: Boys
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Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Sorrow
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nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn’t meant to be.
- Gregory David Roberts
Collection: Grieving