Tom Robbins famous quotes

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
-- Tom Robbins

#Love #Marriage #Time

I have never ever Googled myself, in fact I think the Christian right prohibits such things.
-- Tom Robbins

#Christian #Thinking #Facts

When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.
-- Tom Robbins

#Love #Relationship #Wedding

To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.
-- Tom Robbins

#Leadership #Positive Thinking #Perspective

there are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.
-- Tom Robbins

#Smart #Believe #Two

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
-- Tom Robbins

#Believe #Humor #Government

The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.
-- Tom Robbins

#Love #Dream #Cheer

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
-- Tom Robbins

#Fun #Adventure #Destiny

There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum.
-- Tom Robbins

#Two #Yuck

Madame Lily Devalier always asked "Where are you?" in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.
-- Tom Robbins

#Two #New Orleans #Lilies

You should never hesitate to trade your cow for a handful of magic beans.
-- Tom Robbins

#Inspiration #Anxiety #Magic

You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous about risking one's life. So you lose it, you go to your hero's heaven and everything is milk and honey 'til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That's not courage. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's clichés.
-- Tom Robbins

#Real #Hero #Heaven

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.
-- Tom Robbins

#Memories #Contentment #Wish

The full moon - the mandala of the sky.
-- Tom Robbins

#Moon #Sky #Full Moon

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to admit that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counter-productive but trivial.
-- Tom Robbins

#Religious #Ambition #Political

What I’ve learned along the way is that existence is cosmic theatre, but paradoxically, we should play our roles to the absolute best of our ability while having the wisdom not to take them too seriously.
-- Tom Robbins

#Play #Theatre #Roles

Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.
-- Tom Robbins

#Men #Perspective #Matter

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens -- but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it's love and love alone that really matters.
-- Tom Robbins

#Laughter #Reality #Thinking

Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets.
-- Tom Robbins

#Beets #Breathe #Curious

Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring.
-- Tom Robbins

#Caring #Knowing #Ecstasy

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.
-- Tom Robbins

#Inspirational #Funny #Life

There is no such thing as a weird human being, It's just that some people require more understanding than others.
-- Tom Robbins

#People #Understanding #Being Weird

Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.
-- Tom Robbins

#Real #People #Contradictory

There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent and virtue.
-- Tom Robbins

#Talent #Wealth #Virtue

I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn't, but she always knows where I'll be. She doesn't need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.
-- Tom Robbins

#Beach #Morning #Writing

Minds were made for blowing.
-- Tom Robbins

#Mind #Made

Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.
-- Tom Robbins

#Archives #Instinct

On the mainland, a rain was falling. The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things.
-- Tom Robbins

#Rain #Fall #Essence

There's always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn't get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There's always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can't eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That's when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.
-- Tom Robbins

#Moving #Good Luck #Evil

It is more important to be free than to be happy.
-- Tom Robbins

#Important

Are you aware that rushing toward a goal is a sublimated death wish? It's no coincidence we call them 'deadlines.
-- Tom Robbins

#Rushing #Goal #Wish

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.
-- Tom Robbins

#Running #Soul #Mediocrity

The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.
-- Tom Robbins

#Artist #Doe #Function

The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized.
-- Tom Robbins

#Practice #Enemy #Lazy

You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning 'til dee sun come up.
-- Tom Robbins

#Morning #New Orleans #Sun

The mission of the artist in an over-technologi zed society, is to call the old magic back to life.
-- Tom Robbins

#Artist #Magic #Missions

Salvador Dali and fifty cents will get you a cup of clock melt.
-- Tom Robbins

#Fifty #Cups #Clock

Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.
-- Tom Robbins

#Teacher #Answers #Given

The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine’s Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine’s Day on February’s shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.
-- Tom Robbins

#Valentine #Causes #Lucky

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.
-- Tom Robbins

#Angel #Dancing #Philosopher

Cries for help are frequently inaudible.
-- Tom Robbins

#Helping #Cry

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.
-- Tom Robbins

#Real #Artist #People

To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry; to the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its music; to the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace.
-- Tom Robbins

#Diversity #Grace #World

When humans were young, they were pushed around in strollers. When they were old, they were pushed around in wheelchairs. In between, they were just pushed around.
-- Tom Robbins

#Wheelchairs #Young #Strollers

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.
-- Tom Robbins

#Growing Up #Mean #Learning

Our greatest human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.
-- Tom Robbins

#Adventure #Light #Soul

In the beginning was the thing. And one thing led to another.
-- Tom Robbins

In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.
-- Tom Robbins

#Order #Authority #Respectable

Any half-awake materialist well knows - that which you hold holds you.
-- Tom Robbins

#Half #Awake #Wells

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you - the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.
-- Tom Robbins

#Dark #Thinking #Soul

When two people meet and fall in love, there's a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, we've used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It's hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.
-- Tom Robbins

#Falling In Love #Hard Work #Two

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
-- Tom Robbins

#Running #Passion #Vegetables

Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.
-- Tom Robbins

#Inspiring #Whimsy #Before Death

If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill-take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edges of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.
-- Tom Robbins

#Art #Peace #Passion

Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn
-- Tom Robbins

#Way

In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.
-- Tom Robbins

#Men #Artist #Order

A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.
-- Tom Robbins

#Way #May #Embrace

Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.
-- Tom Robbins

#Essence #Doe #Moments

Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever - which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes.
-- Tom Robbins

#Music #Sweet #Pain

The trick is this: keep your eye on the ball. Even when you can't see the ball.
-- Tom Robbins

#Eye #Balls #Tricks

All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.
-- Tom Robbins

#Self #Roots #People

Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.
-- Tom Robbins

#Phones #Air #Breathing

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.
-- Tom Robbins

#Making Love #Answers #Sides

Curiosity, especially intellectual inquisitiveness, is what separates the truly alive from those who are merely going through the motions.
-- Tom Robbins

#Inspiration #Curiosity #Intellectual

Logic only gives man what he needs... Magic gives him what he wants.
-- Tom Robbins

#Men #Giving #Magic

Often, moreover, it is...that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.
-- Tom Robbins

#Sweet #Keys #Water

The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.
-- Tom Robbins

#Fall #Butterfly #Causes

Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid.
-- Tom Robbins

#Kissing #Oysters #Mermaid

A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes.
-- Tom Robbins

#Spiritual #Food #Circles

Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it in, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.
-- Tom Robbins

#Love #Morning #Stars

As a child, I was an imaginary playmate.
-- Tom Robbins

#Children #Imaginary

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.
-- Tom Robbins

#Art #House #Lovely

Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.
-- Tom Robbins

#Beautiful #Art #Crazy

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.
-- Tom Robbins

#Inspirational #Life #Atheist

Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can't help but make you better.
-- Tom Robbins

#Writing #Helping #Compare

Words on a page can hypnotize you if the rhythm is right
-- Tom Robbins

#Pages #Rhythm

Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It’s not the tobacco we’re after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.
-- Tom Robbins

#Home #Volcanoes #Fire

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.
-- Tom Robbins

#Writing #Fiction #Nimble

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced.
-- Tom Robbins

#Order #Results #Stability

My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything. Not just [mindless] joy, but joy in spite of everything. Recognizing the inequities and the suffering and the corruption and all that but refusing to let it rain on my parade. And I advocate this to other people.
-- Tom Robbins

#Rain #People #Joy

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.
-- Tom Robbins

#Order #Organization #Waiting

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.
-- Tom Robbins

#Men #Paper #Doe

Above all, have a good time. If you aren’t enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it.
-- Tom Robbins

#Reading #Writing #Good Times

Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.
-- Tom Robbins

#Equality #Unique #Different

Our similarities bring us to a common ground; Our differences allow us to be fascinated by each other.
-- Tom Robbins

#Differences #Common #Common Ground

To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox?
-- Tom Robbins

#Giving Up #Paradox #Ready

A sense of humor...is superior to any religion so far devised.
-- Tom Robbins

#Sense Of Humor

So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.
-- Tom Robbins

#Love #Failure #Thinking

We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
-- Tom Robbins

#Funny #Hero #Healing

Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
-- Tom Robbins

#School #Magic #Syntax

To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.
-- Tom Robbins

#Health #Exercise #Healthy

Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.
-- Tom Robbins

#Finding Yourself #Pilots #Ships

Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
-- Tom Robbins

#Cutting #Magic #Using Words

Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve towards a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being.
-- Tom Robbins

#Purpose #States #Evolve

The beet is the most intense of vegetables
-- Tom Robbins

#Vegetables #Beets #Intense

Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.
-- Tom Robbins

#Drinking #Beer #Soul