27 Excellent Russell Brand Quotes That Could Change The Way You Think

Some people say that you’ve crossed the line, but I don’t think that there is a line, I think people draw the line in just after you have traversed it.
Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more – ‘damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial’.
Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.
I recognize that I have the ability to be selfish, but I also recognize that you can’t be happy if you only care about yourself at the expense of other people.
No-one really feels self-confident deep down because it’s an artificial idea. Really, people aren’t that worried about what you’re doing or what you’re saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you.
For me happiness occurs arbitrarily: a moment of eye contact on a bus, where all at once you fall in love; or a frozen second in a park where it’s enough that there are trees in the world.
Life’s never a postcard of life, is it? It never feels like how you’d want it to look.
I like threesomes with two women, not because I’m a cynical sexual predator. Oh no! But because I’m a romantic. I’m looking for “The One.” And I’ll find her more quickly if I audition two at a time.
What was alien was being ordinary, being humdrum, being trapped into appeasing…having to crush and stifle my opinions, not being allowed to be brilliant, tricking myself into mediocrity.
Of all the consumer products, chewing gum is perhaps the most ridiculous: it literally has no nourishment – you just chew it to give yourself something to do with your stupid idiot Western mouth. Half the world is starving, and the other’s going, ‘I don’t actually need any nutrition, but it would be good to masticate, just to keep my mind off things.
The most insightful thing I ever heard, was overheard. I was waiting for a rail replacement bus in Hackney Wick. These two old women weren’t even talking to me – not because I’d offended them, I hadn’t, I’d been angelic at that bus stop, except for the eavesdropping. Rail replacement buses take an eternity, because they think they’re doing you a favour by covering for the absent train, you’ve no recourse. Eventually the bus appeared, on the distant horizon, and one of the women, with the relief and disbelief that often accompanies the arrival of public transport said, ‘Oh look, the bus is coming.’ The other woman – a wise woman, seemingly aware that her words and attitude were potent and poetic enough to form the final sentence in a stranger’s book – paused, then said, ‘The bus was always coming.
I think many of the boundaries that convention has placed upon us are arbitrary, so we can fiddle with them if we fancy. Gravity’s hard to dispute, and breathing, but a lot of things we instinctively obey are a lot of old tosh.
Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it’s just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.
I missed him, of course, but sometimes close friendships have a tidal beat that pulls you towards different shores though the ocean that connects you remains.
Strength does not have to be belligerent and loud.
It’s difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you.
Animals, children, and the working class comprise the company in which I’ll feel most at ease.
The need to find out what will happen if I don’t relent or moderate my actions has been a constant source of difficulty and discomfort in my life.
You’re all beautiful, both inside and out. You mustn’t worry about anything; nothing is important except finding love within yourself and being all honourable and glorious and beautiful. Take things dead slowly ’cause nothing you can attain externally has value, only that which is within yourself already is valuable.
I enjoyed having a reputation as being wild, but these days I try not to worry about what people think in the privacy of their own brain or what they write in the bizarre publicity of their own newspapers, because all of those things are meaningless.
I regret that I didn’t realize that actually they’ve got no power over you at school — it’s all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.
We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless.
When you fall in love you recognise you’re not the most important person in the world, and your focus becomes another person.
Life is not a theme park, and if it is, the theme is death.
It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing? Would Great Ormond Street be so attractive a cause if its beds were riddled with obnoxious little criminals that had “brought it on themselves?
You can’t absolutely make everything the way you want it to be in life. Sometimes things are just different and then you to just move with that and try and remain in contact with what is beautiful about yourself and each other, with any situation.
What I think, whilst human beings are diverse and different, ultimately – Everyone knows what it is to be in love. Everyone knows what it is to find something funny. Everyone knows what it is to hate or to be jealous or feel insecure. We’re made from the same basic stuff: 30 per cent of DNA the same as bananas, 60 per cent the same as worms and 98 per cent the same as chimpanzees, so we can’t be that different from each other. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Sources: BrainyQuote, Goodreads, Policy Mic, IMDb.

Holden Desalles is a pen name for Brandon Gorrell.

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