Pete Holmes > Quotes

“Now, God isn’t something I believe in—it’s something I feel all of us soaking in.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Keep it crispy.”
― Pete Holmes

“My literal belief in the Bible wasn’t saving me, showing me the light, or setting me free. It was causing me pain.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“The strangest thing about becoming an atheist was how little things changed. With no divine rules or threat of eternal punishment hanging over my head, I still somehow managed to not lie, cheat, steal, or kill anybody. Although to be honest, I was a little confused as to why we weren't lying, cheating, or stealing. Not killing people still made sense, but why, for example, should we not steal some peanut butter crackers from the unmanned mini-mart in this Holiday Inn?”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all categories of human thought, including being and nonbeing.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“There I was, talking about God, even quoting the Bible, hitting the ball back and forth with a great mind. It wasn’t awkward, or gross. It was joyful, and fun. And for the first time: I wasn’t fucking ashamed.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“I felt far more Christlike when I stopped calling myself a Christian.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Sad people don't really know what to do to make not-sad people more comfortable around them.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“THERE WERE LAUGHS, TOO. One night, after playing a college in Orlando, as I found myself sitting on the floor, full of a cheap red blend and organic tobacco smoke in a hotel room so sparse and lonely that even Bukowski would’ve been like, “They should get a fern in here or something,” my pity party was strangely and hilariously interrupted. Turned out, my hotel was right next to Disney World. And turned out, Disney World has fireworks every night. Gorgeous, sensational fireworks. Imagine a man, drunk and alone, trying to get a good cry going, slurring along to Adam Duritz playing out of an iPhone speaker, as every joyful color bounces and pops, splashing into the night sky as a barely visible Tinker Bell zips lines to and from the Magic Kingdom, literally granting wishes to the hope-filled children below, all of them audibly cheering and gasping with delight as I lie on the floor motionless, like a pair of sad pants kicked off and waiting for laundry day. I had to laugh. There I was, Depressed Guy, being depressed as gigantic speakers blasted over the cracking fireworks, You can fly! You can fly! You can flyyyy!”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“I HIGHLY SUGGEST YOU CHECK OUT THE FOLLOWING: The book The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers, and the PBS special of the same name. The film Finding Joe is also a good intro to Joey Cambs. Anything by Rob Bell, especially Love Wins and What We Talk About When We Talk About God, and his podcast The RobCast. Anything by Eckhart Tolle, most notably The Power of Now (especially as an audio book) and A New Earth. There are also so many great talks on YouTube. Anything by Richard Rohr, particularly Falling Upward, Everything Belongs, and The Universal Christ, and his audio series The Sermon on the Mount. The podcast The Duncan Trussell Family Hour. Anything by Ram Dass, specifically his audio series Experiments in Truth and Love, Service, Devotion, and the Ultimate Surrender, and his books Grist for the Mill, Polishing the Mirror, Be Love Now, and, when you’re ready, Be Here Now. Also the movies Ram Dass, Going Home; and Dying to Know. Anything by Alan Watts, starting with his audio series You’re It!: On Hiding, Seeking, and Being Found. There’s some amazing content on YouTube as well. And lastly, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“When I grew up in the church, once or twice a year one of the women in our choir would sing a song that really tore the house down called “I Am Not Ashamed.” This was an emotional song for everybody in the room. Our chins would quiver, and we’d close our eyes and put our hands in the air, really feeling it. But looking back, I think what made that song so overpowering to me was that I was ashamed. And I don’t think I was the only one. That’s why we had that song! You don’t have to sing “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” if you’re really not ashamed. No one has ever sang “I am not ashamed of ice cream.” There’s no need.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“There’s a charge to being around Duncan, like one of those light bulbs you touch in the science museum that make your hair stand up, and we hadn’t stopped talking—urgently—since I arrived. We bounced from topic to topic, frantically, like fast friends excited to find someone else who also wanted to talk about religion, mysticism, sex, ghosts, and drugs. We sat down next to the incense like two kids in a dorm room trying to mask illegal aromas, and Duncan hit Record. I told him I wasn’t used to things getting so deep and so interesting so quickly. “That’s what happens when you’re with cool people,” Duncan said. “You end up getting in great conversations.” I wondered in this moment if Duncan knew how unique he was. I wondered if he knew how bored and dismissive people can be when you try to talk about dreams, or out-of-body experiences, or the afterlife, or if you suggest that the physical world is only just a small piece of what’s really going on here. “The plague of the world is that so many people allow themselves to be surrounded by vampires,” Duncan said, using the classiest monster as a word to describe all the what-you-see-is-what-you-get people, the ones who are busy cockblocking the curious weirdos from tripping out on their basic wonder. “Their whole life is one shit conversation to the next to the next to the next until they’re on their deathbed, and that’s the one real conversation they have. They finally say, ‘I love you so much!’ And then they die.” This is Duncan, the opposite of a vampire. He doesn’t drain life from people, he infuses them, resuscitating their awe and bringing color back to their cheeks. The vampires, he warned, “will keep you stuck in the harbor of sorrows. They’ll try to keep your fucking anchor down.” I cackled with laughter. Duncan is one of those rare people who remind you that we’re all here, stuck in our human bodies, confused and curious since we all emerged from the interdimensional space portal commonly known as a vagina. He wants to get into it; he wants to touch, taste, scream, laugh, and sing his way toward enlightenment, and as I sat with him that day, he made me think he just might bring me along with him.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Like how people who claim to have had pastlife experiences are always saying they were Cleopatra, or Napoleon, never just some dude named Kyle who smokes menthols and shovels poop at the zoo.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“It took me over three decades to realize you're not supposed to think about paintings, flowers, or God, you're supposed to merge with them.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Dr. Gary Penn,”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“And that was the last time I went back to my home church, the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was out in the world, pursuing my dream, speaking my truth, using my talents, summoning the courage to share my fears and insecurities in front of strangers to entertain them and leave them happier and feeling less alone, and this guy thought I had fallen from grace because I occasionally said dirty words? Well, fuck that. I never went back.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“The Jesus I knew didn’t go around wagging his finger or condemning people. He ate with sinners and thieves. He knew, and He loved. That’s the funny thing. I felt far more Christlike when I stopped calling myself a Christian.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“I was also taught, like a lot of evangelicals, that if you opened that gift before your wedding night, you would burn in a lake of fire for all eternity, trading the moist heat of a human vagina for the dry heat of eternal damnation.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Before meditation, I used to ask for peace. Now I had the tools to go in and get the motherfucker.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“THE STRANGEST THING ABOUT BECOMING AN ATHEIST was how little things changed. With no divine rules or threat of eternal punishment hanging over my head, I still somehow managed to not lie, cheat, steal, or kill anybody.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“And when I rest in that “I” place, not swept away for the millionth time by my circumstances or headaches or personal disappointments, that’s just how I feel.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“When a chicken comes out of the eggshell,” the Zen philosopher Alan Watts said, “the eggshell is not something to be deplored. It’s certainly something to be broken, but had the shell not existed the chicken wouldn’t have been protected. So, in precisely the same way, images, religious ideas, religious symbols exist in order to be constructively and lovingly broken.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Alpert had his answer, and his suspicion was confirmed: the West was a materialist society, so God came to us, by His grace, as a material. But it was just the introductory course; there were other, better, methods for getting to God, Maharaj-ji said, adding that psychedelics were “good for beginners.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Ram Dass is?”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Now when the meaning of life comes up, or Christ, or Buddha, or any of it, I’m excited. Not just to talk, but to listen and learn and share and grow.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Epicurus—“Why should I fear death? When I am, death is not. When death is, I am not”—and say things like, “Where were you during the Renaissance?” That’s the nothing. The nothing that you were during the Renaissance. I so enjoyed the steam release from my brain that came from accepting the idea that when you die, you go back to that nothing. And being nothing is nothing new. You were nothing far longer than you were Steve, or Cheryl, or Jordan. Infinitely longer, in fact, an uncountable nothing. And it didn’t hurt and you didn’t mind. You just weren’t, and there was no part of you there to panic about it.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“I had prayed to think about God and to think about my problems with him listening in like a divine NSA, which meant that prayer was just my way of inviting God to listen in to the stream of endless thinking I was doing nonstop anyway. “Dear Jesus” meant, “Start listening, God!” “Amen” meant, “Okay, go back to whatever you were doing. Over and out!” My capacity to connect was limited by how well I could think about connection. It was the same way I used to go to museums to think about art. Ram Dass showed me the trap: the mind thinks about things, so of course it wants to confine and reduce both art and God into objects, so it can think”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“IT WAS STRANGE FOR ME TO HEAR ABOUT A HINDU saint referencing Christ at an ashram in India, but to Maharaj-ji, whether Christ or Krishna—take your pick—it was All One. All holy beings were tapping into the same this-ness, the same essential, unchanging I Am. This gave me a signpost back toward my own tradition. These guys weren’t about selling one specific way; they were about finding the fundamental truth laid within every tradition. Many wells, same water. It was comforting to think that the parts of Christianity that had resonated with me in the first phase of my life didn’t have to go into the trash heap—we could save the baby from the bath. It was comforting, too, hearing something familiar, that maybe the small truths I had uncovered in my own church could come on this journey with me.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“CAMPBELL CHANGED MY PERSPECTIVE ON LIFE FROM that of a holding room where you wait to meet Christ later to a living room in which to commune with Christ’s consciousness here and now. It’s not just the personal-relationship “Buddy Jesus” I was taught in Sunday school, the Divine Pal we keep in our pockets, sticking His head out of our handbags like a purse dog, ready to offer help finding parking or protection from the flu that’s been going around. It’s an invitation you extend for His essence to pass through you. Active and empowering, not just “please protect me,” but transform me. Merge with me. Help me kill this overactive, critical, limiting brain of mine. Help me escape the dungeons of cultural expectation, familial expectation, all the I shoulds and I shouldn’ts, I cans and I can’ts. Help me take the small person inside me and kick his ass, leave him for dead, and resurrect to my full, connected, light-filled potential. The story is you being reborn, you getting saved from your basic, boring, limited, mundane, same-story-at-every-party, same-vacation-every-year, same-restaurant-every-birthday, same-river-of-negative-thoughts self-loathing and cruel humanity and awakening to who you really are. Go and do likewise.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God