Life James Brown Quotes & Sayings

Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They're the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that's why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That's what he gets from rowing. — Daniel James Brown

I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike. When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life. Were only Negroes to gain this crown? Was Heaven, then, to be merely another ghetto? — James Baldwin

The moral was, in time of anarchy, tough leadership is the only solution - even though the collateral damage may be heartbreaking. Mrs. Thatcher's strident, take-no prisoners approach was in some ways repugnant, but it was surely necessary. — Nigel Hamilton

A good shell has to have life and resiliency to get in harmony with the swing of the crew. — Daniel James Brown

We are all shades of gray. Its been said again and again; Lifes a process we are fleeting moments that come and go, and I'm grateful for my time, my aspirations, my mistakes, my flaws and my abilities, think of me what you will but before you do, don't. — Alex Gaskarth

Most importantly for me growing up, it was a spirituals, it was a gospels, it was James Cleveland, Aretha Franklin, Marion Williams; and then it was Curtis Mayfield - The Main Ingredient, The Whispers, Black Blue Magic, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross - that music helped me preserves my sanity, help me preserve whatever dignity I was able to preserve, helping to keep going. It was a source of tremendous strength in my life. — Cornel West

Meditation is listening to the divine within — Edgar Cayce

My sock cut off my circulation, my uniform sweater itched, and my underwear seemed to be staging some sort of revolt to make me as uncomfortable as possible.
And this were the good points of the day. — Jenny B. Jones

I've been to two stadium gigs in my life. One was James Brown and the other was Pink Floyd. They both sounded the same. I couldn't tell the difference between James Brown and Pink Floyd. I've never liked stadiums. — Boz Burrell

The typical Irish peasant ate about 10 pounds of potatoes each day and soon towered in physical size over their rural English equivalents who mainly ate bread. — Rashers Tierney

I really tried to make movies I wanted to see. I thought that if I was good enough, somebody would always need me. — Jason Patric

I've been performing since I was in high school, so I've seen people react to my music and my playing. I'm always appreciative when people like the music, but I'm not shocked. — Kenny G

-Do you recognize suffering? -I hope I do. -Injustice? -Again, I hope I would. -Then you are a political man. — Anita Shreve

There's always someone's father, someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems. — Glen Duncan

Eventually as a teenager, I was pulled up on stage by James Brown's saxophone player, Maceo Parker, during one of his concerts and scatted on his stage for 20 minutes. After I was done, Maceo's bass player got down on one knee as if he were proposing, took a string off of his bass guitar and coiled it up around my ring finger. He hushed the crowd and said into the microphone, "Wendy, from this day forward you are married to music. You have a gift from God. You must devote your life to using this gift or else you will deprive the world of something so special." I got the chills. — Wendy Starland

But as a kid, I preferred the black side, and often wished that Mommy had sent me to black schools like my friends. Instead I was stuck at that white school, P.S. 138, with white classmates who were convinced I could dance like James Brown. They constantly badgered me to do the "James Brown" for them, a squiggling of the feet made famous by the "Godfather of Soul" himself, who back in the sixties was bigger than life. I tried to explain to them that I couldn't dance. I have always been one of the worst dancers that God has ever put upon this earth. — James McBride

To be left with only the trace of a memory is to gaze at an armchair that's still molded to the form of a love who has left never to return: It is to grieve, dear reader, it is to weep. — Orhan Pamuk

Thanksgiving creates abundance; and the miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks-take the just one loaf, say it is enough, and give thanks-and He miraculously makes it more than enough. — Ann Voskamp

Nature turns all malfaisance to good. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

If it weren't for the mentorship and guidance from people like my mother, James Brown and others, I wouldn't have been able to make something of my life. — Al Sharpton

But it's in that disappointment, in that confusion, in that pain - the pain that comes from things not going how I wanted them to - that I find the same thing happening, again and again. I come to the end of myself, to the end of my power, the end of my strength, the end of my understanding, only to find, in that place of powerlessness, a strength and peace that weren't there before. — Rob Bell

Pocock paused and stepped back from the frame of the shell and put his hands on his hips, carefully studying the work he had so far done. He said for him the craft of building a boat was like religion. It wasn't enough to master the technical details of it. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart. He turned to Joe. "Rowing," he said, "is like that. And a lot of life is like that too, the parts that really matter anyway. Do you know what I mean, Joe? — Daniel James Brown

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping them downstream, bumping and scraping, until they got caught by the horseshoe bend that is New Orleans. Not so much as a single pebble 'came' from New Orleans, any more than any of the people did. Every grain of sand, every rock, every drip of brown mud, and every single person walking, living and loving in the city is a refugee from somewhere else. But they made something unique, the people and the land, when they came together in that cohesive, magnetic, magical spot; this sediment of society made something that is not French, not Spanish, and incontrovertibly not American. — James Caskey

He's not lazy. He's just highly inefficient. — Cinda Williams Chima

I felt invincible. My strength was that of a giant. God was certainly standing by me. I smashed five saloons with rocks before I ever took a hatchet. — Carry Nation