J. L. B. Smith Quotes

I like to push people till I get the truth out of them. Get them drunk, or whatever. Then discover what they really think. Push them and push them and push them.

I like to get where the cabbage is cooking and catch the scents.

What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?

This last month I have felt the burden of a city. Its great sorrow has pressed in on my soul. Its vice and sin have bowed me upon my knees in tears.

It's very expensive to be me.

Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)

We definitely aren't very good at staying in one place. There's not a domesticated bone in my body.

How comes it to pass, if they be only moved by chance and accident, that such regular mutations and generations should be begotten by a fortuitous concourse of atoms.

How can people say they don't eat eggplant when God loves the color and the French love the name? I don't under'stand.

Climbing is unadulterated hard labor. The only real pleasure is the satisfaction of going where no man has been before and where few can follow.

Working safely is like breathing - if you don't, you die.

In Christ we are given the courage and strength to change the world

Acknowledge all man as fellow creation, but don't follow him.

I'm here right now and I want now to be the greatest time.

Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams.

There can be no prevailing in prayer without travailing in prayer.

Unpopular, lonely and loving, Elinor need not trouble, For if she were not so loving, She would not be so miserable.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

You have to accept gifts occasionally, because there are some things you can’t give yourself

I can think of no greater disaster to this country than to have the voters of it divide upon religious lines.

Stop whining; start enjoying. And when you look back at the past, make sure you're smiling.

I think that objects have memories. I’m always thinking that I’ll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime.

The most dangerous and successful conspiracies take place in public, in plain sight, under the clear, bright light of day -- usually with TV cameras focused on them.

It is emphatically the case that life could not arise spontaneously in a primeval soup from its kind.

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.

Don't be defeatist, dear, it's very middle class.

Theres a difference between solitude and loneliness

Try not to cry too much because it can be pretty heart-breaking and pretty hard.

I said 'It can't go on' and he said 'No, it can't.' Honestly, I don't think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.

Each person has a literature inside them.

At university I had a big coloured scarf and people would often say, 'All right, Doctor Who?' And, I thought, I rather liked that notion.

I never thought to ever ask for money. I was so stupid.

Vickie Lynn Hogan is my birth certificate's name.

I'm not handsome enough to be James Bond. Maybe a villain, though.

If you want to be happy for a short time, get drunk happy for a long time, fall in love; happy forever, take up gardening.

I could write songs as bad as Wham's if I really felt the urge to, but what's the point?

Love is what sometimes holds us and binds us when we’re not so happy.

We never cry out to God and receive a returned check stamped 'Insufficient grace.'

...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

Everyone has sadness-I just get mine out in my music so that I can laugh and joke and flirt with you!

If you're not shootin', you should be loadin'. If you're not loadin, you should be movin', if you're not movin', someone's gonna cut your head off and put it on a stick.

Nobody notices me. Nobody thinks I'm me. But then I look less like me than most of the people coming to our concerts.

I think that if you become a parent, you stop being a child, and your position in relation to your parents changes.

The only generation that can reach this generation is our generation.

Drinking rum before 10 am makes you a pirate, not an alcoholic.

I was always kind of naïve, and really needed to be given some direction.

He who would preach powerfully must pray effectively.

The further I get from the things that I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get.

Everything I do has the tinge of the finite, of my own demise. At some point you either accept death or you just keep pushing it back as you get older and older. I've accepted it.

Power from on high . . . It is God inserting into you divine activity with mightiness.