B.J. Penn Quotes

Avoid flatterers, for they are thieves in disguise.

There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

I'm not a breakfast eater.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Using simple equipment and daylight alone is for me a pleasure and a replenishment.

You get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right.

My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.

That on a romantic level, if you feel it about somebody and it's pure, it means that they do too.

In all debates, let truth be thy aim, not victory, or an unjust interest.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

Always remember to bound thy thoughts to the present occasion.

So if we have anything original to offer, it's to speak from our own life about the society we're in.

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

There is no shame in my saying that we all want to be loved.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

Force may subdue, but love gains, and he that forgives first wins the laurel.

When everything gets answered, it's fake.

Atheism is the absence of religion. We don’t really need atheism. We just need to get rid of religion.

If you are doing something for reward or punishment, you do not have morality.

In music, if you hit a wrong note, people forgive you. In magic when something goes wrong, the entire art is destroyed.

Photographing a cake can be art.

Deliverance from believing lies must come from believing truth.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

I longed to know the world's name.

Those who live to live forever, never fear dying.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

For nothing reaches the heart but what is from the heart, or pierces the conscience but what comes from a living conscience

I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes

I think voting for the lesser of two evils in game theory always leads to more evil.

If you look at a thing, the very fact of your looking changes it...if you think about yourself, that very fact changes you.

Avoid popularity; it has many snares, and no real benefit.

Much better than the feeling of having things is the feeling of having earned things.

Friendship is the union of spirits, a marriage of hearts, and the bond thereof virtue

Birds fly and fish swim and I do this.

There can be no Friendship where there is no Freedom.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

Charity is ... a universal remedy against discord, and an holy cement for mankind.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

Better to be uneducated than educated by your government.

What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.

The best recreation is to do good.

Never give out while there is hope; but hope not beyond reason, for that shows more desire than judgement.

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality.

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

I just want to be known as the greatest everis that too much to ask?

If you don’t vote, you don’t matter.