Johnny Cash Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

Success is having to worry about every damned thing in the world, except money. I still don't understand it. If you don't have any time for yourself, any time to hunt or fish, that's success?

Johnny Cash
We own a mansion, but that's home; we're dug into it. I got some woods over there, maybe 80 acres of woods. In the middle there's just a two-room shack. I'll go over there and sit around — read a lot.

Johnny Cash
I think it speaks to our basic fundamental feelings, you know. Of emotions, of love, of breakup, of love and hate and death and dying, mama, apple pie, and the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory, country music does.

Johnny Cash
I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion — against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas.

Johnny Cash
I thank God for all the freedom we have in this country, I cherish it – even the right to burn the flag. But we also have the right to bear arms and if you burn my flag – I'll shoot you!

Johnny Cash
I have tried drugs and a little of everything else, and there is nothing in the world more soul-satisfying than having the kingdom of God building inside you and growing.

Johnny Cash
The line "because you're mine, I walk the line." It kept coming to me, you know? But I was — I was … young and not been married too long. Yes, it kept coming to me. Because you're mine, I walk the line. And then the words just naturally flowed. It was an easy song to write.

Johnny Cash
I speak partly from my own experience. I have been behind bars a few times — sometimes of my own volition, sometimes involuntarily. Each time, I felt the same feeling of kinship with my fellow prisoners. I know how lonely they feel, how lonely they are.

Johnny Cash
Many a good man I saw fall
And even now, every time I dream
I hear the men and the monkeys in the jungle scream.
Drive on, it don't mean nothin'
My children love me, but they don't understand
And I got a woman who knows her man.

Johnny Cash
So I simply don't buy the concept of "Generation X" as the "lost generation". I see too many good kids out there, kids who are ready and willing to do the right thing, just as Jack was. Their distractions are greater, though. There's no more simple life with simple choices for the young.

Johnny Cash
My music is not country-Western. A am a country boy, and a lot of my music has a country sound to it.

Johnny Cash
There's always rhythm going in my mind. … I'm either singing them — June will tell you, I'm either singing them, or I have got the beat going from one, or I'm writing one.

Johnny Cash
Drug abuse runs through this family like a turkey through the corn. Man, it's terrible. We're just trying to save him, trying to snatch him up before he goes.

Johnny Cash
Cash: I went into a coma and I was there for 12 days. They all thought I was dying and they couldn't diagnose what was wrong with me. They finally came up with a diagnosis of Shy-Drager syndrome. It was few months later they realized I didn't have that so it was Parkinson's. And then it was not that. Then finally it was autonomic neuropathy. … And I'm pretty well resolved to the fact that that's what it is. And it's a slow process of the nerve endings.
King: No cure?
Cash: No, I don't think so. But that's all right. There's no cure for life either.

Johnny Cash
I think everybody should serve their time for their country. I did. It's not up to every man to decide when it's time to go defend our country. We elect men to decide that for us.

Johnny Cash
I used to get high and think I was an Indian flyin' through the woods. Till I woke up beside the lake with no shoes on and my foot in a stumphole there.

Johnny Cash
I'm not bitter. Why should I be bitter? I'm thrilled to death with life. Life is — the way God has given it to me was just a platter — a golden platter of life laid out there for me. It's been beautiful.

Johnny Cash
I keep my eyes wide open all the time,
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds,
Because you're mine,
I walk the line.

Johnny Cash
San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell. May your walls fall and may I live to tell.

Johnny Cash
He drank his first strong liquor then to calm his shaking hand, and tried to tell himself at last he had become a man.

Johnny Cash
Some gal would giggle and I'd get red, and some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head. I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named Sue.

Johnny Cash
We'll all be equal under the grass, and God's got a heaven for country trash.

Johnny Cash
I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get. Some of those stories are as wild as any HG Wells could drum up. And that Jesus! He really cuts me up! I worship him, but he tickles me to death.

Johnny Cash
Come heed me, my brothers, come heed, one and all
Don't brag about standing or you'll surely fall
You're shining your light and shine it you should
But you're so heavenly minded, you're no earthly good

Johnny Cash
How could this torment possibly do anybody any good?... You sit on your cold steel mattressless bunk and watch a cockroach crawl out from under the filthy commode, and you don't kill it. You envy the roach as you watch it crawl out under the cell door.

Johnny Cash
You can ask the people around me. I don't give up. I don't give up... and it's not out of frustration and desperation that I say I don't give up. I don't give up because I don't give up. I don't believe in it.

Johnny Cash
Sometimes I'll have a breakfast sandwich, which is two fried eggs with crisp bacon on cinnamon toast. It's good, it really is. You want one?

Johnny Cash
I can work in that garden all morning and I'm ready to come in here and make the show in the afternoon.

Johnny Cash
I never did drink badly; a beer now and then, but I don't like it. It burns up my energy, makes me sleepy.

Johnny Cash
It was a tough fight, and nobody else can whip it. It's only been about 18 months ago that I quit pills. Eighteen months ago, I was walking death. I used to take up to 100 pills a day. I don't know why in the world they didn't kill me. Any doctor would tell you it would. I would play one against the other — pep pills to pep me up, tranquilizers to calm me down.

Johnny Cash