Henry Rollins Quotes

You can't control how you are perceived, and you are a fool if you waste any energy trying to do so. Vanity will get you nowhere.

Fantasy is like an idealized reality, and the core of fantasy is the one person can make a difference.

Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.

'The Grace of Kings' was meant to read like a set of legends about characters who were bigger than life.

Some day I will show all the [people] who say I was a success just because of my pretty face. Sometimes I wish I had a really bad car accident so my face would get smashed up and I'd look like Eddie Constantine.

To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life.

Sometimes we behave and perform with our lives, not for God, but for an audience.

Thoughts about myself hinder my usefulness to God.

Lao Tzu says: "Accept yourself. Non-acceptance is the root of all the trouble." None of us accept ourselves. The more a person doesn't accept himself, the greater a mahatma he looks to others to be. We are our greatest enemy. If we had our way, we would cut ourselves to pieces in order to remove what was unacceptable.

The average man plays to the gallery of his own self-esteem.

At this slower pace the journey took a couple of days, and I fought off a few minor threats along the way --griffins, carnivorous plants, giant serpents, hostile centaurs, that sort of thing, purely routine --and I was beginning to get bored when at last the dusky towers of Castle Roogna hove into view.

It's the same thing: I would think, "If I can't go out and pull some teenager tonight, maybe I'm no good on stage anymore." And you start to think that you even need it as a motivation. I did, anyway.

I will deny I ever said this, of course, but the gods need heroes. They always have. Otherwise we would not keep you annoying little brats around." I feel so wanted. Thanks.

I have an ego like anybody else, but I don't need to be stoked by going before the public all the time.

Beautiful women must think about their beauty as capitalists think about their investments or politicians about their majorities; it is all they have to insure their places in the world.

The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself.

We rob men of a greater vision of God because we will not give them a lower vision of themselves.

If many people love me, then I must be important.

And as a writer, your self-worth is literally based on the last thing you wrote.

The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.

If you would improve, submit to be considered wihout sense and foolish with respect to externals. Wish to be considered to know nothing; and if you shall seem to someone to be a person of importance, distrust yourself.

We can't look to the world to restore our worth; we're here to restore our worth to the world. The world outside us can reflect our glory, but it cannot create it. It cannot crown us. Only God can crown us, and he already has.

We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money.

The favor of God does not bless self-promotion

A vain man finds his account in speaking good or evil of himself.