We’ve gathered these Henry Rollins quotes to inspire you in countless ways that you can apply into your daily life.
Henry Rollins was a famous lead vocalist of the band, Black Flag.
Aside from being a musician, he is also an active speaker and an activist.
Henry Rollins will make you feel empowered while listening to his music or every time he speaks.
He is known for being smart and living his life on his own terms.
Learn more about Henry Rollins and what he stands for through this collection.
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And don’t forget to check out these music quotes.
Best Henry Rollins Quotes
1. “My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.”
2. “Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength. Move on.”
3. “It hurts to let go. Sometimes, it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone, the more it wants to get away.”
4. “Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.”
5. “You need a little bit of insanity to do great things.”
6. “Youth is fleeting and life is short, you might as well strike hard. Anything else is just average.”
7. “No such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as downtime. All you got is a lifetime. Go.”
8. “I’ll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.”
9. “Strength is the product of struggle. You must do what others don’t to achieve what others won’t.”
10. “Giving a good performance, giving it all is what it’s all about. I love to perform.”
11. “We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don’t. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.”
12. “I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.”
13. “Yes. I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowded room with boring people than I feel on my own.”
14. “Life will not break your heart. It’ll crush it.”
Famous Henry Rollins Quotes
15. “When you start to doubt yourself, the real world will eat you alive.”
16. “Sometimes, the truth hurts. And sometimes, it feels real good.”
17. “Don’t do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your *ss off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.”
18. “I want a soul mate who can sit me down, shut me up, tell me 10 things I don’t already know, and make me laugh. I don’t care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow. I will nibble your mukluks with my own teeth. I will do your windows. I will care about your feelings. Just have something in there.”
19. “Knowledge without mileage equals b*llsh*t.”
20. “I just get things done instead of talking about getting them done. I don’t go out and party. I don’t smoke, drink or do drugs and I’m not married, that leaves a lot of time for my work.”
21. “I can only write about personal stuff—about my point of view.”
22. “Use the time wisely because it is running out, but don’t freak out about it.”
23. “I don’t believe in fate or destiny. I believe in various degrees of hatred, paranoia, and abandonment.”
24. “Muscle mass does not always equal strength. Strength is kindness and sensitivity. Strength is understanding that your power is both physical and emotional. That it comes from the body, and the mind, and the heart.”
25. “So, one way or another, I found myself in a few movies. I take it seriously when I’m on the set, but I don’t take myself seriously as an actor.”
26. “You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like.”
27. “It is sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.”
28. “I have no pride about anything I have done. It’s just not the way I think about things. I do the work, always, as hard as I can, to the point of pain, injury, exhaustion, if that is what it takes. Once I am done, I move on.”
29. “Half of life is f*ck*ng up, the other half is dealing with it.”
Meaningful Henry Rollins Quotes
30. “Somewhere, someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched.”
31. “I forged myself out of a vacuum. I crawl along the highway on hacked off stumps year after year. Some wonder how and why. I never do.”
32. “I want to meet a woman that will make me stop and listen to what she has to say. I want a woman who will make my jaw drop in awe. A woman that has little time for me. One who does not throw herself at me. One who respects herself who has a sense of herself. Where is she?”
33. “I will never say the things that I want to say to you. I know the damage it would do. I love you more than I hate my loneliness and pain.”
34. “The lowest stress environment is the radio show. I am not on camera and I can let the music do the talking. The rest is more highly pressurized or in the case of writing, time intensive task. I say yes to all of it and like all of it but the radio show, by nature of what it is, is the least hassle.”
35. “I have found the iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But 200 pounds is always 200 pounds.”
36. “I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. Do not be like your parents. Do not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.”
37. “All by yourself, unable to express the pain of your distress with your deeper inside. You alienate yourself and everybody else.”
38. “You can still function as a living ruin.”
39. “Keep your blood clean, your body lean, and your mind sharp.”
40. “Girls aren’t beautiful, they’re pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else.”
41. “I am on until I am dead, like a light bulb.”
42. “It is our destiny to be born beautiful into an ugly age.”
43. “I definitely learned a lesson this time. I know that I can be broken. I am not as tough as I thought. I see it now. At this point, it’s the only thing good that came out of all of this. I know myself better now and know what I have to do.”
44. “I’ll be here tomorrow. If I can make it through today.”
Profound Henry Rollins Quotes About Life
45. “If you hate your parents, the man, or the establishment, don’t show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do.”
46. “When life hands you a lemon, say, ‘Oh yeah, I like lemons! What else ya got?’”
47. “I never did drugs, really. I tried acid a few times, smoked m*r*j**n* once. I just never liked any of it. I would’ve rather drank a litre of paint.”
48. “A rose trapped inside a fist.”
49. “I’m so burned out, the only person I can stand is myself. I’m the only one I would put through this. Wheels and wings, The ride is everything. I’m all I’ve got. I’m all I can take. Another day has destroyed a part of me. So far so good.”
50. “Life forgets me, but will not let me forget. Holds me down and tells me that I’m free.”
51. “I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don’t want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun—hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks.”
52. “Do it or don’t. It’s amazing how many things in life are that easy.”
53. “When you are too tired to eat, you really need some sleep. A few days later, things became strange. Loud noises become louder and more startling, familiar sounds become unfamiliar, and life reinvents itself as a surrealist dream.”
54. “I do my best to limit the amount of compromise in my life so I have more time to do what I want. Not hanging out with many people really helps. I am not a people person and I spend a great deal of time on my own and in this environment, I get a lot done.”
55. “When you are young, there is so much ahead of you, it’s like the Saharan desert. You can’t even see across it.”
56. “I just want to be able to stand up straight for a little while before I get cut down.”
57. “It is impossible, after a certain point, to go back to a previous way of life, a previous way of thinking.”
58. “I am ready for whatever’s coming. I expect nothing but to be let down or turned away. I am alone. The sh*t hurts sometimes, but I realize what I am, what I have become.”
59. “If I had to live my life in anticipation of what others thought of me, little would get done.”
Henry Rollins Quotes Filled With Wise Lessons
60. “For some, there is no music. No lights. No fire. No untamed madness that breathes life. There is work, anguish, frustration, rage, despair. A dullness that rings like wooden thunder.”
61. “Basically, men are afraid of women and can’t handle the fact that they came out of the same thing they spend the rest of their lives trying to get back into.”
62. “In the worst of times the best among us never lose their moral compass, and that is how they emerge relatively unscathed.”
63. “Creating problems is easy. We do it all the time. Finding solutions, ones that last and produce good results, requires guts and care.”
64. “Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.”
65. “Pizza makes me think that anything is possible.”
66. “Change is hard, but change is good.”
67. “If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will always write. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.”
68. “Nothing brings people together more than mutual hatred.”
69. “You are the untold story. You are the impassioned truth wanting to scream its existence, to be forever trapped by a strong hand clapped firmly over the mouth of my soul.”
70. “Respect is not a one way street.”
71. “When you title yourself, you immediately lend yourself to all kinds of pretensions.”
72. “You know, we are one nation under a god. Yes, you were right. An angry, crack-slinging god who decorates with bullets and spends condoms.”
73. “Humans are pretty amazing at living pretty much anywhere and so that makes me optimistic that perhaps humanity will be able to survive itself, because the reality is that we are going to have problems with water in this century.”
74. “I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness. There are things that haunt us our entire lives—we are unable to let them go. The good times seem almost effervescent and dreamlike in comparison with the times that didn’t go so well.”
Henry Rollins Quotes About Love and Relationships
75. “My love is a thousand French poets puking black blood on your Cure CD collection.”
76. “I want you bad like a natural disaster. You are all I see. You are the only one I want to know.”
77. “Is it a shame that I can’t accept love? Am I too burned out to move towards what will keep me alive or too smart to get pulled into someone else’s world?”
78. “I got my heart broken. My spirit got shattered and mutilated. I will not be coming back from this. I don’t want to.”
79. “They say true love only comes around once and you have to hold out and be strong until then.”
80. “He looked at her. Something turned cancerous. He was in love.”
81. “Love heals scars love left.”
82. “I could fall in love with a cruel desert that kills without passion, a canyon full of scorpions, one thousand blinding arctic storms, a century sealed in a cave, a river of molten salt flowing down my throat. But never with you.”
83. “My love runs deeper than the wounds.”
84. “You don’t make me feel like you used to. That’s why I’m leaving. That’s why people leave each other. They come to their senses and get selfish again.”
85. “There’s got to be someone for me. It’s not too much to ask. Just someone to be with. Someone to love. Someone to give everything to someone.”
86. “Everything you do makes my body scream with loneliness.”
87. “Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.”
88. “It’s no surprise to me that anyone hardly tells the truth about how they feel. The smart ones keep to themselves for good reason. Why would you want to tell anyone anything that’s dear to you?”
89. “Even when you like them and want nothing more than to be closer to them? It’s so painful to be next to someone you feel so strongly about and know you can’t say the things you want to.”
Interesting Henry Rollins Quotes About Self-Awareness
90. “I am well protected, too locked up inside myself to get free.”
91. “I like boring black and white films with subtitles. I’m basically a drip.”
92. “I would like to be able to gently drift in and out of existence when I wanted to.”
93. “My dick is a macho sh*th**d but the rest of me is a sensitive, caring, and gentle guy.”
94. “I am a pretty crazy person, so it’s best for me to be on my own most of the time.”
95. “I’m packed with broken glass and memories and it all hurts.”
96. “You are beautiful like demolition. Just the thought of you draws my knuckles white.”
97. “I think of the thrill of an intelligent woman talking just to me.”
98. “You can find me in the frozen mood section.”
99. “I cling to my memories of glorious desperation.”
100. “I’m trying to be confrontational and direct. If I lack directness then I only have myself to blame because I lack the skills to make my point clear.”
101. “I feel like a visitor that got left behind by his ride.”
102. “I get tired of talking when I want to be silent.”
103. “It is you who makes me see what I really am.”
104. “I’m not close to people, I am close to myself. I spend a lot of time inside.”
Henry Rollins Quotes on Truth and Reality
105. “Somewhere, someone isn’t impressed by your looks. Not all men jump through the hoops of your fire. You’re unbelievably boring to more people than you’ll ever know.”
106. “You can get away with a lot of sh*t if it looks like it’s all you know how to do.”
107. “Don’t let despair mutate your flesh. Look at my twisted stumps of thought. See the fingers, listen to the voice. I am slowly becoming the end of the line.”
108. “However much of that gets heaped upon you doesn’t matter, it’s only a matter of how much you can take and what it does to you.”
109. “The moon will never lie to anyone. Be like the moon. No one hates the moon or wants to kill it.”
110. “A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.”
111. “We came to the end, we found nothing. Nothing! And we cursed because we were hoping for so much less.”
112. “Always knowing you’re going to die, and until then, knowing you’ve got to live.”
113. “In my world, there would be as many public libraries as there are Starbucks.”
114. “You always know the mark of a coward. A coward hides behind freedom. A brave person stands in front of freedom and defends it for others.”
115. “You forgave me in a dream the other night. The more you told me it was alright, the worse I felt. I know that you were only doing it because you knew I couldn’t possibly hurt you more than I already had. I could see what forgiving me was doing to you. I know that you think I’m to stupid to figure it all out. When you forgave me, you knew that it was finally over.”
116. “I have heard people say that they felt closer to their parents after they have died. Maybe if I treat people as if they were dead, I could get along with them better.”
117. “Each year, every city in the world should have a multi day festival. More people meeting each other, digging new types of music, new foods, new ideas. You want to stop having so many wars? This could be a step in the right direction.”
118. “Here in this moment we are beautiful, nocturnal creatures and our thoughts and words are jewels guarded by the moon.”
119. “I don’t think you’ll ever have a perfect world because we humans are prone to error, and so we’re always in search of an upgrade.”
Henry Rollins Quotes on Music and Career
120. “I don’t mean to be arrogant and I really appreciate my fans. But talking about what I am doing is not something I’m good at. I do what I do and that’s it. I want to get back to my work and do more of it instead of talking about it.”
121. “I can’t imagine being 60 years of age and playing music I wrote when I was in my 20s. I would rather sail the sea of consequence to new lands. Laps around the shallow end of the pool, not for me.”
122. “I don’t mind The Boss. I think he’s an honest guy. I have some of his records, not all of them. I’ve met a couple of the E-Street guys, and they seem really cool.”
123. “Live music is the cure for what ails ya.”
124. “I love the hate mail I get, the unsigned, misspelled letters telling me to go back to Russia or whatever.”
125. “Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.”
126. “I mean I appreciate fan mail and that the people like what I am doing but I can’t answer it. If I would answer 25 letters a day, I would be just a guy answering mail and not an artist anymore.”
127. “This is my 25th year of being on stage. A lot of people who I kind of tied up to the starting line with are no longer in this position. I feel very, very lucky.”
128. “Maybe I’m just a psycho, and the stage is a better place to go than either the loony bin or somewhere else.”
129. “I love to go on stage and sing.”
130. “It’s easy for me to play bad guys because it’s a very linear acting. Bad guys aren’t empathetic. Being a bad guy is great because you’re not friendly and you don’t have to do much with your face.”
131. “I can’t remember that I ever had just a minute of stage fright.”
132. “I can deal with people who watch me on stage but I am not good at communicating with people any other way than through my work.”
133. “I’ve always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you’ve got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn’t supposed to be easy.”
134. “I’m most in my element on tour, with a gig that day, like today. I’m on the road where I am supposed to be. I will be where I’m supposed to be at nighttime, on stage, in front of people, doing my thing.”
Henry Rollins Quotes That Will Change Your Way of Thinking
135. “I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure.”
136. “My main goal is to stay alive. To keep fooling myself into hanging around. To keep getting up every day.”
137. “You can’t right the wrongs because you’ll never understand the cause and you’ll be too busy dodging the effect.”
138. “People are best on records and books because you can turn them off or put them back on the shelf.”
139. “The material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you, including yourself.”
140. “It’s about time that governments feared the people instead of the other way around.”
141. “I have come to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time to have too much pride in anything. Perhaps it’s good to have a sense of duty, a jealous zeal to protect or improve, but pride ultimately is only that which stands vulnerable to offense and degradation.”
142. “No magic. I do believe you might have taken it all with you when you went away.”
143. “The only way to keep your head above it and heal your wounds is to crawl away.”
144. “Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.”
145. “Go without a coat when it’s cold—find out what cold is. Go hungry—keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it’s all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without. In times of hardship, you find out what you’re made of and what you’re capable of. If you’re never tested, you’ll never define your character.”
146. “Perfection. I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch.”
147. “You’ll never know that just sitting across a room full of people, I have transformed you into a goddess—a destroyer of despair.”
148. “To hate is to show you still care, who needs that, focus on what’s really important.”
149. “Best not to mix the past with the present. The present paints the past with gold. The past paints the present with lead.”
Henry Rollins Quotes About Humanity
150. “Don’t hide behind the Constitution or the Bible. If you’re against gay marriage, just be honest, put a scarlet ‘H’ on your shirt, and say, ‘I am a homophobe!’”
151. “I simply cannot understand how any parent could kill themselves.”
152. “The average is the borderline that keeps mere men in their place. Those who step over the line are heroes by the very act. Go.”
153. “When people hold you in high esteem, it’s a very delicate relationship. When they meet you, they’re putting all their chips up. It’s make or break.”
154. “If I was a woman these days, I’d be killing m*th*rf*ck*rs. My handgun would never cool and my hands would be covered in testicular blood. I would have a horrible reputation with a lot of men because I would be calling them on their weak b*llsh*t left and right.”
155. “Books are cool, but knowledge without mileage doesn’t mean anything to me.”
156. “Gay people don’t have a personality problem. They have a problem with small-minded m*th*rf*ck*rs who can’t conquer a one inch high curb.”
157. “I hate it when men go to strip bars. It lowers the rest of us that know if a man has to pay to see a woman naked, he is a loser and probably should get weeded out.”
158. “If American forces leave Afghanistan, the Taliban is going to do what to America? Don’t say you’re worried about what they will do to the Afghan people. If that was America’s concern, America’s operational presence there would be much different.”
159. “Americans are poorly served by their media, you know, for the war machine and propaganda machine and the global empire and they’re poorly served by what they are being told is representative government.”
Henry Rollins Quotes to Transform Your Life
160. “The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute.”
161. “There is no heaven for me and no hell—and certainly not any karma.”
162. “I see walking bombs on the street, hearts not beating, but ticking.”
163. “The blues is losing someone you love and not having enough money to immerse yourself in drink.”
164. “The times I have tried to get close to someone resulted in me feeling threatened and weak.”
165. “I’ve got a knife and I want to talk to you. I’ve got a prayer and I want to carve it for you. I’ve got no chance, that’s why I’m looking to you, O Lord. Ride with me.”
166. “The truth is that you don’t have any friends, not now, not ever. You think you’re with someone and then you find that you’re just alone in a room with a stranger. You spent so much time running away from yourself, fulfilling imaginary duties to your friends, that you don’t even know who you are. When the sh*t comes down, you can’t even count on yourself. Isn’t that a shame. Get ready for one of the longest nights ever.”
167. “If you have an idea of what you want to do in your future, you must go at it with almost monastic obsession, be it music, the ballet, or just a basic degree. You have to go at it single-mindedly and let nothing get in your way.”
168. “Is there anything that I can call mine that will not eventually be taken from me? Is there anything, anyone, ever?”
169. “Maybe some things are better left broken and scattered—veiled in darkness, secret bitterness, and self-doubt.”
170. “Why do you think the old stories tell of men who set out on great journeys to impress the gods? Because trying to impress people just isn’t worth the time and effort.”
171. “I’m constantly around people that talk a lot but say nothing. A sad case.”
172. “Sometimes I would get invited to a party or to go out to dinner by one of them and I would decline. Part of me wanted to go, but those kinds of outings always made me feel even more alienated than usual. Hearing them talk made me feel lonely and hateful at the same time. Lonely because I didn’t fit in, never did. When I was reminded, it hurt. And hateful because it reaffirmed what I already knew, that I was alone and on the outside.”
173. “It’s hard to get along with people. As much as you try to like them and accept them as individuals, it becomes difficult because they keep getting out of line and wasting your time.”
174. “If there was a god, he wouldn’t let a guy walk right up and shoot you in the face now would he? That’s right, now you get the picture. Truth burns, doesn’t it?”
Emotional Henry Rollins Quotes
175. “Anyone who wants to help me doesn’t. Anyone who wants to kill me might. Anyone who wants to love me better not.”
176. “What I don’t want to do is go out there and not be able to mean it, you know?”
177. “Now and then, someone is able to look at an empty space, conclude it would be a great place to start a revolution, and bravely go forward.”
178. “I like the idea of someone else’s love safely sealed in a song or a book.”
179. “Horror jolts me when I look at one of you and see a pair of beautiful eyes that make me think your mind might contain a world that could hold me as the bolts shake loose and fly from my frame.”
180. “Help me to withstand your beauty as it stands out of reach. Give me the capacity to forget ever having felt your touch.”
181. “I spend several days at a time without enough sleep. At first, normal activities become annoying.”
182. “How memories lie to us. How time coats the ordinary with gold. How it breaks the heart to go back and attempt to relive them. How crushed we are when we discover that the gold was merely gold-plating thinly coated over lead, chalk and peeling paint.”
183. “I will do my best to dodge tonight’s depression. Hide in sleep. Damage myself in dreams. Wake up older, slightly more used.”
184. “I know you’ll never love me but maybe you’ll stay for a while.”
Henry Rollins Quotes About How Seasons Change
185. “In winter, I plot and plan. In spring, I move.”
186. “August—the summer’s last messenger of misery—is a hollow actor.”
187. “I have come to regard November as the older, harder man’s October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer’s death as winter tightens its grip.”
188. “August used to be a sad month for me. As the days went on, the thought of school starting weighed heavily upon my young frame. That, coupled with the oppressive heat and humidity of my native Washington, D.C., only seemed to heighten the misery.”
189. “August brings into sharp focus and a furious boil everything I’ve been listening to in the late spring and summer.”
190. “Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, it’s great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity.”
191. “I am a veteran of the War on Christmas. I am just emerging from a battlefield strewn with dead trees and torn shreds of brightly colored wrapping paper.”
192. “Damn, I was lonely that autumn. I wished for a girl I could hang out with. I never really did anything to meet girls, too shy, too f*ck*d up. Autumn makes me think of women.”
193. “I want to change things for the better, just like everybody else.”
194. “We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer’s wreckage. We will welcome summer’s ghost.”
More Henry Rollins Quotes
195. “I am too far gone to be rehabilitated.”
196. “As long as I tell the truth, I feel that nobody can touch me.”
197. “What goes best with a cup of coffee? Another cup.”
198. “It’s easy for me to play bad guys because it’s a very linear acting. Bad guys aren’t empathetic. Being a bad guy is great because you’re not friendly and you don’t have to do much with your face.”
199. “Don’t push me. I’ve got a corner at my back. I’ve nowhere to go except over you.”
200. “Keep me preoccupied. Keep me busy, busy, busy. So I won’t have to think. I don’t want to think. Because it only brings me pain. I just keep running away from my problems. Keep me busy. Give me a million things to do. So I can keep running away from myself.”
201. “There’s one thing about Black Sabbath which should not be understated. If Black Sabbath is missing any one of its members, it’s no longer Black Sabbath.”
202. “To my ears, jazz sounds better in warm weather and after the sun has gone down. While I will listen to some of my favorite jazz records in cooler weather, it’s the warmer nights that really make them come alive. Something about those sounds and the heat of the night really makes it happen for me.”
203. “Now, if someone wants to spit on me, I just roll up the window of my BMW 540i.”
204. “Love is self-deception. I am a living creature. Hate is only self love. I am a double feature.”
205. “I have gone to great lengths to expand my threshold of pain.”
206. “She lit my soul and inhaled deeply, flicking my ashes occasionally.”
207. “We Americans look funny when we’re in France because we don’t travel. We are fairly uncultured, whereas Europeans go to Africa all the time because it’s right there.”
208. “There is a concerted effort to keep you and me—you know, the people—away from what ‘war’ really looks like, ’cause when you’re selling war, when it’s such a big industry. What they don’t tell you is the rest of it and the down side of it. And so obviously there is a lot of money and a lot of time and effort being spent on that campaign ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace.’”
209. “I think to myself—I don’t want to survive this one, I want to burn up in the wreckage.”
210. “You have to realize there are other people, other economies, governments, cultures, religions, and destinies going on at the same time as yours. You have to widen the scope of your lens and start seeing more.”
Did Henry Rollins Help You Change Your Perspective?
Henry Rollins’ life, since childhood, was not really happy. His parents divorced and his mother’s boyfriend always beat him up. He was very insecure of himself while growing up and developed depression.
He struggled with his life after dropping out of college even though he worked different jobs. During this time, he started to be more active making music and gained some popularity.
He was beginning to enjoy the attention he was getting from the people. He got more famous and successful when he became the lead singer of the Black Flag band.
Henry Rollins taught us that rejection is not the end of our dreams. Life is short and you have all the chances to do whatever your plan is. Just do it and never rely on others’ opinions of what you should do.
Which of these Henry Rollins quotes is your favorite? What lessons did you learn? We’d love to hear from you, so leave a comment below.