Top 100 Robert Fulghum Quotes
#1. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.
Robert Fulghum
#2. I once listed all the good things I did over the past year, and then turned them into resolution form and backdated them. That was a good feeling
Robert Fulghum
#3. You will continue to read stories of crookedness and corruption - of policemen who lie and steal, doctors who reap where they do not sew, politicians on the take. Don't be misled. They are news because they are the exceptions.
Robert Fulghum
#4. If you want an interesting party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone.
Robert Fulghum
#5. We are the only creatures that both laugh and weep. I think it's because we are the only creatures that see the difference between the way things are and the way they might be.
Robert Fulghum
#6. So you drive as far as you can, even when you can clearly read the sign. You want to think you are exempt, that it doesn't apply to you. But it does. Life is still a dead end. And we still have a hard time believing it
Robert Fulghum
#8. As one old gentleman put it, Son, I don't care if you're stark nekkid and wear a bone in your nose. If you kin fiddle, you're all right with me. It's the music we make that counts.
Robert Fulghum
#9. Is it always to be a winners-losers world, or can we keep everyone in the game? Do we still have what it takes to find a better way?
Robert Fulghum
#10. The point is that getting married for lust or money or social status or even love is usually trouble. The point is that marriage is a maze into which we wander - a maze that is best got through with a great companion.
Robert Fulghum
#11. Peace is not something you wish for, it is something you make, something you are, something you do,and something you give away.
Robert Fulghum
#12. Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., the summer I turned
Robert Fulghum
#13. We even make ourselves up, fusing what we are with what we wish into what we must become. I'm not sure why it must be so, but it is.
Robert Fulghum
#14. Manuals have their uses ... but they are not to be confused with living.
Robert Fulghum
#15. Any fool can make enough money to survive. It's another thing to keep yourself consistently entertained. It's a lot of work, and a lot of fun, to make a life.
Robert Fulghum
#16. Almost anything can be dealt with if people are of good will and light hearts and strong values.
Robert Fulghum
#17. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found.
Robert Fulghum
#18. Desire is the intangible quality that has more impact on success than talent, education, or IQ. You can't see desire, but you can feel its presence, and see its results in the lives of successful people.
Robert Fulghum
#19. If you tell people you talk to God, they'll think you're religious, but if you say God talks to you, it's ten to one they'll think you're crazy.
Robert Fulghum
#20. The gift was not large as money goes, and my need was not great, but the spirit of the gift is beyond price and leaves me blessed and in debt.
Robert Fulghum
#23. The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence. The grass is greenest where it is watered.
Robert Fulghum
#24. To ponder is not to brood or grieve or even meditate. It is to wonder at a deep level.
Robert Fulghum
#25. Living things have been doing just that for a long, long time. Through every kind of disaster and setback and catastrophe. We are survivors.
Robert Fulghum
#26. Making a living and having a life are not the same thing. Making a living and making a life that's worthwhile are not the same thing. Living the good life and living a good life are not the same thing. A job title doesn't even come close to answering the question. "What do you do?".
Robert Fulghum
#27. The name is not important anymore - it's the tone that counts. I feel like an old dog I know. He will come to any name you call him, just so long as your demeanor carries with it the promise of affection and food
Robert Fulghum
#28. The leaves let go, the seeds let go, and I must let go sometimes, too, and cast my lot with another of nature's imperfect but tenacious survivors.
Robert Fulghum
#29. Wherever and however any one of us may be conceived, it is the same. We come into being in the arms of God.
Robert Fulghum
#31. Liberation, I guess, is everybody getting what they think they want, without knowing the whole truth. Or in other words, liberation finally amounts to being free from things we don't like in order to be enslaved by things we approve of. Here's to the eternal tandem.
Robert Fulghum
#32. A giraffe has a black tongue twenty-seven inches long and no vocal cords. A giraffe has nothing to say. He just goes on giraffing.
Robert Fulghum
#33. Pardon me, but my father says that it is a lie that Americans have everything. You have no sheep, no goats, no trees, no oil, no vines, no wine, not even chickens. He asks, 'What kind of life is that?' He says, 'No wonder you don't sing or dance or recite poetry very often.
Robert Fulghum
#34. Above all, if what you've done is stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid.
Robert Fulghum
#35. My goal now is to dance all the dances as long as I can, and then to sit down contented after the last elegant tango some sweet night and pass on because there wasn't another dance left in me.
Robert Fulghum
#36. To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'
Robert Fulghum
#37. It wasn't in books. It wasn't in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.
Robert Fulghum
#38. If we could just figure out how to have more fun at it, maybe more of us would join the ranks of those who seek after justice and mercy.
Robert Fulghum
#40. All I really need to know ... I learned in kindergarten.
Robert Fulghum
#41. Yelling at living things does tend to kill the spirit in them. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts ...
Robert Fulghum
#42. Even if your watch is full of diamonds the hour is still 60 minutes
Robert Fulghum
#43. This is an exercise in power - the power of mind over matter. If you don't mind being inadequate, it doesn't matter.
Robert Fulghum
#44. We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love.
Robert Fulghum
#45. Life will examine us continually to see if we have understood and have practiced what we were taught that first year of school.
Robert Fulghum
#47. Water is everywhere and in all living things; we cannot be seperated from water. No water, no life. Period. Water comes in many forms - liquid, vapor, ice, snow, fog, rain, hail. But no matter the form, it's still water.
Robert Fulghum
#48. Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens ... My grandfather would say we're part of something incredibly wonderful - more marvelous than we imagine. My grandfather would say we ought to go out and look at it once in a while so we don't lose our place in it.
Robert Fulghum
#49. If you can't find the exact quote you want, make it up.
Robert Fulghum
#50. It doesn't matter what you say you believe - it only matters what you do.
Robert Fulghum
#51. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there at the sandpile at Sunday School.
Robert Fulghum
#52. If I don't have time to live my life well the first time, when am I going to find the time to go back and live it over?
Robert Fulghum
#53. The winding down of summer puts me in a heavy philosophical mood.
Robert Fulghum
#54. Children are sent to school to be civilized, to learn to be part of the social enterprise.
Robert Fulghum
#55. Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.
Robert Fulghum
#56. Love is the grand prize and the garbage heap. Love is a spiritual root canal and the only thing that makes life worth living. Love is a little taste of always and a big bite of nothing. And love is everything in between these extremes.
Robert Fulghum
#57. Whenever life becomes Tinkertoys, the queen may be sacrificed.
Robert Fulghum
#58. But love may have to be left off the exam. Most of us will never learn.
Robert Fulghum
#59. I'd like to speak a foreign language well enough to get the jokes. I'd like to talk with Socrates, and watch Michelangelo sculpt David. I'd like to see the world as it was a million years ago and a million years hence.
Robert Fulghum
#60. You are free to give life meaning, whatever meaning you want to give it.
Robert Fulghum
#61. The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so that he could repay the man, the Sikh said that Menon owed the debt to any stranger who came to him in need, as long as he lived. The help came from a stranger and was to be repaid to a stranger.
Robert Fulghum
#62. Arguing whether or not a God exists is like fleas arguing whether or not the dog exists. Arguing over the correct name for God is like fleas arguing over the name of the dog. And arguing over whose notion of God is correct is like fleas arguing over who owns the dog.
Robert Fulghum
#63. For all my good intentions, there are days when things go wrong or I fall into old habits. When things are not going well, when I'm grumpy or mad, I'll realize that I've not been paying attention to my soul and I've not been following my best routine.
Robert Fulghum
#64. You can't always explain everything you do to everybody, you know.
Robert Fulghum
#65. About winning and losing: It isn't important, what really counts is how you play the game. About playing the game: PLAY TO WIN!
Robert Fulghum
#66. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Robert Fulghum
#67. And snow - snow is not my enemy, I tell him. Snow is God's way of telling people to slow down and rest and stay in bed for a day. And besides, snow always solves itself. Mixes with the leaves to form more earth, I tell him. Think compost, says I.
Robert Fulghum
#68. Infinite possibility in all things is a certainty. That pretty much covers theology and philosophy for me.
Robert Fulghum
#69. I get tired of hearing it's a crummy world and that people are no damned good. What kind of talk is that? I know a place in Payette, Idaho, where a cook and a waitress and a manager put everything they've got into laying a chicken-fried steak on you.
Robert Fulghum
#70. Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.
Robert Fulghum
#71. I often say that I don't worry about the meaning of life
I can't handle that big stuff. What concerns me is the meaning in life
day by day, hour by hour, while I'm doing whatever it is that I do. What counts is not what I do, but how I think about myself while I'm doing it.
Robert Fulghum
#72. The kindergarten children are confident in spirit, infinite in resources, and eager to learn. Everything is still possible.
Robert Fulghum
#73. I wanted to be a citizen of the world but not in a superficial way.
Robert Fulghum
#74. The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are.
Robert Fulghum
#76. Just when you thought that you already learned the way how to live, life changes - and you're left the same as you begun.
Robert Fulghum
#77. It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and our air force has to have a bake-sale to buy a bomber.
Robert Fulghum
#78. I believe it is in my nature to dance by virtue of the beat of my heart, the pulse of my blood and the music in my mind.
Robert Fulghum
#79. The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. No, not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be.
Robert Fulghum
#80. It's not that I'm not grateful for all this attention. It's just that fame and fortune ought to add up to more than fame and fortune.
Robert Fulghum
#81. Don't sell yourself short. You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think.
Robert Fulghum
#82. Only now have I finally realized that my life has been an unending field trip. And I have tried hard not to be a tourist. But to be an adventurer, a traveler, an explorer, a learner, and a pilgrim.
Robert Fulghum
#83. When my neighbor walks the dogs, he performs a ritual act of sacer simplicitas, to use the church Latin: "sacred simplicity." Walking the dog is in truth a ritual of renewal and revival on an intimate scale - a small rebirth of well-being on a daily basis.
Robert Fulghum
#84. Anything can happen. The great banana peel of existence is always on the floor somewhere.
Robert Fulghum
#85. Sometimes history knocks at the most ordinary door to see if anyone is home. Sometimes someone is.
Robert Fulghum
#86. Think of what a better world it would be if we all - the whole
world had cookies and milk about 3 o'clock every afternoon and then
lay down with our blankets for a nap.
Robert Fulghum
#87. And sure, I know if you eat this way you'll die. So? If you don't eat this way you're still going to die. Why not die happy?
Robert Fulghum
#88. You may never have proof of your importance but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn't do without you. The rub is that you don't always know who.
Robert Fulghum
#89. Never forget that music is too important to be left entirely in the hands of professionals.
Robert Fulghum
#90. Ignorance and power and pride are a deadly mixture, you know.
Robert Fulghum
#91. Speed and efficiency do not always increase the quality of life.
Robert Fulghum
#92. Play fair. Don't hit people. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Robert Fulghum
#93. We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box.
Robert Fulghum
#94. I and you-We are infinate, rich, large, contradictory, living, breathing miracles-free human beings, children of God and the everlasting universe. That's what we do.
Robert Fulghum
#95. Life-and-death. Lifedeath. One event. One short event. Don't forget.
Robert Fulghum
#96. It is the chair in honor of all those who, however competently, embrace the impossible. Sit in that chair someday.
Robert Fulghum
#97. All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten. Share everything ... Don't hit people ... Clean up your own mess ...
Robert Fulghum
#98. All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sand pile at Sunday School.
Robert Fulghum
#99. I fear the boredom that comes with not learning and not taking chances.
Robert Fulghum
#100. Once you know where the roller coaster is going, are you in for the ride?
Robert Fulghum
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