Quotes

I need to get out more - or at least my mind does. Until recently I'd never heard of Tom Robbins. Now that I have, I keep coming back to quotes I found online.

When you lose direction or veer slightly off course, it's often the words of others wiser than you that steer you back. Or sometimes you just need a soul-plunge. These are both. In case you've never heard of him, here are a few of his words:

“Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.”

“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.”

“Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.”

“To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”

“Our Similarities bring us to a common ground; Our Differences allow us to be fascinated by each other”

“There is no such thing as a weird human being, It's just that some people require more understanding than others”

“Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.”

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

“There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.”

“Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.”

“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.”

“I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred.”

“The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating”

“Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef”

“The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.”

“Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it”

“Who knows how to make love stay?
Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.
Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.
Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

“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.”

“When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.”

“Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.”

“It is never too late to have a happy childhood”

“If little else, the brain is an educational toy.”

“When life demands more of people than they demand of life - as is ordinarily the case - what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death”

“Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.”

“Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats ...”

“Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek”

“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.”

“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.”

“In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.”

“To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being.”

“That's for God sure. People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.”

“Ideas are mallable and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse---and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is by this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with the people who are attracted to it, until the last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogmas by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.”

“If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.”

There are perspectives within these that should be engraved on my soul... thoughts that I want to turn over in my hands like jewels. Placing them here is a start.