Best Johnny Cash Quotes

Johnny Cash Quotes About Life, Love, Coffee, God, Music, June Carter, Trust & Family! Johnny Cash, best known as the Man in Black, was a singer, guitarist, and composer whose music blended country, rock, blues, and religion. February 26, 1932, was the day of Cash’s birth. The following 15 years of Cash’s life were spent laboring in the fields with his family to assist them in paying off their debts. Early in his youth, at the age of 12, Cash started creating songs and expressing his passion for music. Cash’s religious upbringing had a significant influence on his early life.

After graduating from high school in 1950, Cash left Dyess, Mississippi, and travelled to Pontiac, Michigan, to work in an auto body shop. Immediately after the first Sun session, starting work on the Cash-penned “Hey Porter.” In May of that year, “Hey Porter” was published, while “Cry, Cry, Cry” reached number 14 on the Billboard charts.

His breakthrough came in 1956 when his song “I Walk the Line” went to the top of the country charts and sold two million copies. Additionally, Cash tried to distinguish himself as an actor by appearing in the film Five Minutes to Live (1961) and a few Foreign television shows. Johnny Cash started presenting The Johnny Cash Program in 1969, a TV variety show that included a wide range of current performers, from Bob Dylan to Louis Armstrong.

With the live CD Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, he was awarded two Grammy Awards (1968). He was rewarded into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980, making him the youngest living member who died on September 12, 2003, at 73. As a feature film, “Walk the Line,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, was released in 2005.

Best Johnny Cash Quotes

1. “All your life, you will be faced with a choice. You can choose love or hate… I choose love.” – Johnny Cash

2. “Life and love go on, let the music play.” – Johnny Cash

3. “I learn from my mistakes. It’s a very painful way to learn, but without pain, the old saying is, there’s no gain.” – Johnny Cash

4. “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

5. “I found out that there weren’t too many limitations, if I did it my way.” – Johnny Cash

6. “The ones that you’re calling wild are going to be the leaders in a little while.” – Johnny Cash

7. “You miss a lot of opportunities by making mistakes, but that’s part of it: knowing that you’re not shut out forever, and that there’s a goal you still can reach.” – Johnny Cash

8. “It’s good to know who hates you and it is good to be hated by the right people.” – Johnny Cash

9. “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” – Johnny Cash

10. “I took the easy way, and to an extent I regret that. Still though, the way we did it was honest. We played it and sang it the way we felt it, and there’s a lot to be said for that.” – Johnny Cash

11. “Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money.” – Johnny Cash

12. “If you aren’t gonna say exactly how and what you feel, you might as well not say anything at all.” – Johnny Cash

13. “You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” – Johnny Cash

14. “I’m not bitter. Why should I be bitter? I’m thrilled to death with life.” – Johnny Cash

15. “People call me wild. Not really though, I’m not. I guess I’ve never been normal, not what you call Establishment. I’m country.” – Johnny Cash

16. “What have I become, my sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away, in the end.” – Johnny Cash

17. “How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man.” – Johnny Cash

18. “God gives us life and takes us away as he sees fit.” – Johnny Cash

19. “There’s no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.” – Johnny Cash

20. “You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it.” – Johnny Cash

21. “There’s a lot of things blamed on me that never happened. But then, there’s a lot of things that I did that I never got caught at.” – Johnny Cash

22. “Life is rough so you gotta be tough.” – Johnny Cash

23. “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

24. “Of emotions, of love, of breakups, 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

25. “However, neither he nor anyone else could have become the star Elvis was. Ain’t nobody like Elvis. Never was.” – Johnny Cash

26. “They’re powerful, those songs. At times they’ve been my only way back the only door out of the dark, bad places the black dog calls home.” – Johnny Cash

27. “You’ve got a song you’re singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you’ve got to make them think that you’re one of them sitting out there with them too. They’ve got to be able to relate to what you’re doing.” – Johnny Cash

28. “That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio. The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station.” – Johnny Cash

29. “I start a lot more songs than I finish, because I realize when I get into them, they’re no good. I don’t throw them away, I just put them away, store them, get them out of sight.” – Johnny Cash

30. “I love to go to the studio and stay there 10 or 12 hours a day. I love it. What is it? I don’t know. It’s life.” – Johnny Cash

31. “I knew I wanted to sing when I was a very small boy. When I was probably 4 years old. My mother played a guitar and I would sit with her and she would sing and I learned to sing along with her.” – Johnny Cash

32. “It’s like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it’s off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent I think.” – Johnny Cash

33. “For you I know I’d even try to turn the tide.” – Johnny Cash

34. “There’s unconditional love there. You hear that phrase a lot but it’s real with me and her. She loves me in spite of everything, in spite of myself. She has saved my life more than once. She’s always been there with her love, and it has certainly made me forget the pain for a long time, many times. When it gets dark and everybody’s gone home and the lights are turned off, it’s just me and her.” – Johnny Cash

35. “Loneliness is emptiness, but happiness is you.” – Johnny Cash