Top 100 Robert Fulghum Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Robert Fulghum

#1. 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

#2. Children are sent to school to be civilized, to learn to be part of the social enterprise.

Robert Fulghum

#3. The winding down of summer puts me in a heavy philosophical mood.

Robert Fulghum

#4. 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

#5. To insist on one's place in the scheme of things and to live up to that place.To empower others in their reaching for some place in the scheme of things.To do these things is to make fairy tales come true.

Robert Fulghum

#6. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there at the sandpile at Sunday School.

Robert Fulghum

#7. It doesn't matter what you say you believe - it only matters what you do.

Robert Fulghum

#8. If you can't find the exact quote you want, make it up.

Robert Fulghum

#9. 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

#10. And good neighbors make a huge difference in the quality of life. I agree.

Robert Fulghum

#11. 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

#12. Everything we can imagine becomes real.

Robert Fulghum

#13. 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

#14. Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.

Robert Fulghum

#15. 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

#16. Even if your watch is full of diamonds the hour is still 60 minutes

Robert Fulghum

#17. The best feelings in your life come when you start feeling good after you've been feeling just awful

Robert Fulghum

#18. 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

#19. To understand our love they'd have to turn the world upside down

Robert Fulghum

#20. All I really need to know ... I learned in kindergarten.

Robert Fulghum

#21. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in a breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference.

Robert Fulghum

#22. The examined life is no picnic.

Robert Fulghum

#23. 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

#24. It wasn't in books. It wasn't in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.

Robert Fulghum

#25. Remember, most of us got something for nothing the first time just by showing up here at birth. Now we have to qualify.

Robert Fulghum

#26. I think my writing is part of my ministry.

Robert Fulghum

#27. 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

#28. I wanted to be a citizen of the world but not in a superficial way.

Robert Fulghum

#29. The kindergarten children are confident in spirit, infinite in resources, and eager to learn. Everything is still possible.

Robert Fulghum

#30. Even the finest workman needs to inspect his work critically.

Robert Fulghum

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. Infinite possibility in all things is a certainty. That pretty much covers theology and philosophy for me.

Robert Fulghum

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. You can't always explain everything you do to everybody, you know.

Robert Fulghum

#39. To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence, hollering, 'What's it for?'

Robert Fulghum

#40. 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

#41. The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history.

Robert Fulghum

#42. 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

#43. I've always made a clear distinction between making a life and making a living.

Robert Fulghum

#44. 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

#45. You are free to give life meaning, whatever meaning you want to give it.

Robert Fulghum

#46. 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

#47. But love may have to be left off the exam. Most of us will never learn.

Robert Fulghum

#48. Whenever life becomes Tinkertoys, the queen may be sacrificed.

Robert Fulghum

#49. 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

#50. It's the spirit here that counts. The time may be long, the vehicle may be strange or unexpected. But if the dream is held close to the heart, and imagination is applied to what there is close at hand, everything is still possible.

Robert Fulghum

#51. I believe in dancing.

Robert Fulghum

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found.

Robert Fulghum

#55. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.

Robert Fulghum

#56. Almost anything can be dealt with if people are of good will and light hearts and strong values.

Robert Fulghum

#57. 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

#58. Manuals have their uses ... but they are not to be confused with living.

Robert Fulghum

#59. 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

#60. Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., the summer I turned

Robert Fulghum

#61. I talk about very serious human affairs but with a lightness of heart.

Robert Fulghum

#62. 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

#63. There is nothing in your budget for joy. No books, no flowers, no music, not even a cold beer. And there is nothing in your budget to give away to someone else. We don't help people who don't have better values than you do.

Robert Fulghum

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. An artists job is to see. And to go out in the world and see it firsthand, just as it is; to report with line and words what is seen. To be in the world, not just study about the world, that is the artists task

Robert Fulghum

#68. Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity.

Robert Fulghum

#69. 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

#70. Dreams are more powerful than facts.

Robert Fulghum

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. If you want an interesting party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone.

Robert Fulghum

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. I don't think there is a hidden purpose to the universe that you have to puzzle out.

Robert Fulghum

#77. 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

#78. Weddings seem to be magnets for mishap and for whatever craziness lurks in family closets. In more ways than one, weddings bring out the ding-dong on everybody involved.

Robert Fulghum

#79. Above all, if what you've done is stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid.

Robert Fulghum

#80. And I'm not confused about the lack of, or the need for, imagination in low or high places. We could do better we must do better. There are far worse things to drop on people than crayolas.

Robert Fulghum

#81. 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

#82. Why is love easy? I don't know. And the raccoons don't say.

Robert Fulghum

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. I use Cheer. I like the idea of a happy wash.

Robert Fulghum

#86. 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

#87. The heart will turn to a prune if love is always by the numbers. How will you know if someone really loves you if they only meet your expectations and not your needs?

Robert Fulghum

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. The pig was so earnest. So sincere. So very "there." The pig brought gravity and mythic import to this well-worn fairy tale.

Robert Fulghum

#92. I'm good at doing the laundry. At least that. And it's a religious experience ... Water, earth, fire-polarities of wet and dry, hot and cold, dirty and clean. The great cycles-round and round-beginning and end-Alpha and Omega, amen.

Robert Fulghum

#93. 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

#94. I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Robert Fulghum