Bryce Courtenay Quotes

Here is my theory on this one. If you write things down, if there is a mystery and you try and explain it, once you've written it down for permanent, in due time, it'll be proven stupid.

As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it proves to be.

My mother's bottom line was truth to her values. It meant bringing your heart and your humanity to work.

Immortals are, by definition, immortal. End of story.

Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. 'It is time,’ he said, ‘for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.

Human nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

The question of relevance comes before that of truth, because to ask whether a statement is true or false presupposes that it is relevant (so that to try to assert the truth or falsity of an irrelevant statement is a form of confusion).

Science repudiates philosophy. In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.

Some people will follow their minds without listening to their hearts, and others will follow their hearts without listening to their minds. This is why reason exists, for there to be balance between the heart and mind. We were not meant to follow the mind and ignore the heart. Instead, we were meant to follow the heart over the mind, but without completely abandoning logic. The middle way is the preferred way, and this path simply means to allow your heart to drive you, but do not forget to balance reason with your conscience.

You have no skills in your hands. You have no education of understanding the meaning and the purpose and the compassion and the relationship. You have just a profession.

There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

We are all students of the world; frail embodied consciousnesses struggling to understand, and be a meaningful part of this great, mysterious gift of life.

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Ma vie est une énigme dont ton nom est le mot. (My life is an enigma, of which your name is the word.)

If you follow your heart, if you listen to your gut, and if you extend your hand to help another, not for any agenda, but for the sake of humanity, you are going to find the truth.

The world needs more than just itself. Amid the dreariness, people do not need a distraction that will in the end become dreary itself; they are asking for mystery, even if they do not realize this themselves. They need the sign of the wholly Other, the living Word of God, entering into this our age in unadulterated trustworthiness and dynamism.

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

We take comfort, however, that mystery is not a synonym for contradiction.

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

A mystery is solved with a story.