Comedy Sex God Quotes

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“I think this is what Christ meant when he said you have to lose your life to find it. I had to lose my faith to find it. You can’t just sign for someone else’s God delivery. You can’t just worship others’ spiritual experience—their rapture, their truth, their conversion—you need to find your own. And to do that, you need to get your hands dirty. Faith isn’t certainty, it’s adventure, something you’re going to come back from dusty and bruised, having seen and done things you never would have even considered before. Your doubt is welcome on this journey, as is your disbelief. You’re going to meet so many different approaches to God—enjoy them all. Collect as many stamps in your passport as you can.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Losing things, changing how and what you believe, is all part of it. It was the plan all along. It’s not about how long you can hold on to the first hot potato you were handed, the faithful being let into heaven with their burned hands, smelling like french fries: “Well done, good and faithful potato holder.” This isn’t an endurance test to see if you can maintain the faith you inherited as a child. It’s messy, and it’s supposed to be messy. It’s mysterious, because it’s a mystery. I once saw losing my faith as the worst thing I could possibly do, the one thing I was told never to do, and now I see it as an essential step to my developing a three-dimensional, vibrant, living faith.”
― 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

“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

“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

“And it was starting to sink in. It was clear all this back and forth wasn’t actually about sex or being horny. It was about fear. It wasn’t about lust. It was about my attachment to my desires, my identification with them. It was my resistance to seeing myself as a soul. It was a fear of being separate, removed from a connection with the Divine because I was always drowning in my own humanity, forever a spectator to the Love and Oneness I had heard stories about, like I had been sent away from the party for wearing the wrong clothes. But in this moment, I realized no one had the authority to send me away. There was no doorman. I was the doorman. Hell, I was the party.”
― 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

“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

“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

“The problem with the intellect,” Ram Dass said, “is that it doesn’t allow you to escape from dualism. That is, it always thinks about something. So, it always takes an object. So, as long as you identify with your thinking mind, you are always one thought away from where the action is. You’re always thinking about it. Or looking at it. You’re always one thought away from life.” I realized that for me, God itself had become another thought that my brain could think about, which always kept it at arm’s distance. But getting to Detroit, or the Kingdom of Heaven, or Nirvana, was about resting in consciousness without an object. Just pure, unencumbered awareness.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Alpert would also become comfortable relating what he was learning in the East back to the mainstream religion of the West. He called himself “somewhere between the pure mind of the Buddha and the heart of the Christ, which for a Jewish boy is not bad.” “All methods are traps,” Alpert said. “Meditation is a trap. You don’t want to end up a meditator, you want to end up free. Judaism is a trap. This is a hard one, for those that are Jews. You don’t want to end up a Jew, you want to end up free. We just have to choose our traps wisely, and hope they’ll self-destruct after they’ve served their purpose.” The great saint Ramana Maharshi shared in this idea, likening your method to a stick with which you stoke a fire. Once the flames were high enough, the last step was to throw the stick into the fire as well, so that all you are left with is Light.”
― 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

“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

“Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharaj-ji.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

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

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

“Neem Karoli Baba”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“Well, that’s the problem,” Duncan said. “A group of people have this very potent, powerful thing, and they’re all pretending that it’s turned on when it’s just blank. The moment you plug into this fucking thing, however you do it—you can plug into this as an atheist, you can plug into this as an agnostic, you can plug into it as whatever—the moment you get a taste of it you can’t fake it.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God

“My mind flashed to another billboard, this time one near a church in my neighborhood that said over a graphic of a failing heart monitor, “When you die, you will meet God.” This was meant as a threat, obviously—par for the course in my tradition—but Duncan’s response to it would be, “Why wait?” The hero’s journey was about going on an adventure to find a diamond only to realize it had been sewn into the lining of your coat the entire time. We were all beggars sitting on a box, not realizing the box we never bothered to open was filled with gold. We were already one with everything, already holy, already complete—we had just forgotten.”
― Pete Holmes, Comedy Sex God