Top 500 Bob Dylan Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Just a reminder, if you tell anyone about what happened with Jonah last night, I’ll destroy all of my writing and never play music again.”

— Bob Dylan

402. “I don’t usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of quote, so-called, relationships.”

— Bob Dylan

403. “It’s sundown on the Union and what’s made in the USA, sure was a good idea, until greed got in the way.”

— Bob Dylan

404. “As long as you give my friend Jonah Lehrer a free pizza, I’ll write a song about your restaurant.”

— Bob Dylan

405. “Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people, they’re drinking, thinking that they got it made. Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things, but you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it, babe.”

— Bob Dylan

406. “Passion is a young man’s game. Young people can be passionate. Older people gotta be more wise. I mean, you’re around awhile, you leave certain things to the young. Don’t try to act like you’re young. You could really hurt yourself.”

— Bob Dylan

407. “Heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening. Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughing. Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter.”

— Bob Dylan

408. “Everyone of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.”

— Bob Dylan

409. “Fearing not that I’d become my enemy In the instant that I preach.”

— Bob Dylan

410. “You use to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat, who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.”

— Bob Dylan

411. “Madonna, she still has not showed, we see this empty cage now corrode, where her cape of the stage once had flowed, the fiddler he now steps to the road, on the back of the fish truck that loads, while my conscience explodes.”

— Bob Dylan

412. “Fortune or fame, you must pick one or the other, though neither of them are to be what they claim.”

— Bob Dylan

413. “Stay free of petty jealousies, live by no man’s code, and hold your judgment for yourself, lest you wind up on this road.”

— Bob Dylan

414. “I’m a liberal to a degree, I want everybody to be free. But if you think that I’ll let Barry Goldwater move in next door.”

— Bob Dylan

415. “Well the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount, But nothing really matters much it’s doom alone that counts.”

— Bob Dylan

416. “One who sings with his tongue on fire, gargles in the rat race choir.”

— Bob Dylan

417. “There’s beauty in the silver singing river There’s beauty in the sunrise in the sky But none of these and nothing else can match the beauty That I remember in my true love’s eyes.”

— Bob Dylan

418. “Now the wintertime is coming The windows are filled with frost I went to tell everybody But I could not get across Well, I wanna be your lover, baby I don’t wanna be your boss Don’t say I never warned you When your train gets lost.”

— Bob Dylan

419. “God bless them pretty women, I wish they was mine, Their breath is as sweet, The dew on the vine.”

— Bob Dylan

420. “The rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame, preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain.”

— Bob Dylan

421. “He’s hell bent for destruction, he’s afraid and confused, and his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.”

— Bob Dylan

422. “I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze With the innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn I courted her proudly but now she is gone Gone as the season she’s taken.”

— Bob Dylan

423. “Bent out of shape from society’s pliers, cares not to come up any higher, but rather get you down in the hole that he’s in.”

— Bob Dylan

424. “When the jelly faced women all sneeze, hear the one with the mustache say I can’t find my knees.”

— Bob Dylan

425. “Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed, dignity never been photographed.”

— Bob Dylan

426. “Michelangelo indeed could have carved out your features.”

— Bob Dylan

427. “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule.”

— Bob Dylan

428. “I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.”

— Bob Dylan

429. “Well the Lone Ranger and Tonto, they are riding down the line fixing everybody’s troubles, everybody except mine.”

— Bob Dylan

430. “Watch waterfalls of pity roar, you feel to moan but unlike before, you discover that you’d just be one more person crying.”

— Bob Dylan

431. “There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It’s hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger.”

— Bob Dylan

432. “I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.”

— Bob Dylan

433. “The only person you have to think about lying twice to is either yourself or to God. The press isn’t either of them. And I just figured they’re irrelevant.”

— Bob Dylan

434. “The only sound that’s left after the ambulances go is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row.”

— Bob Dylan

435. “Ain’t it hard when you discover that, he wasn’t really where it’s at, after he took from you everything he could steal. How does it feel?”

— Bob Dylan

436. “Anger and jealousy’s all that he sells us, he’s content when you’re under his thumb. Madmen oppose him, but your kindness throws him, to survive it you play deaf and dumb.”

— Bob Dylan

437. “The Harmonica is the world’s best-selling musical instrument. You’re welcome.”

— Bob Dylan

438. “Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.”

— Bob Dylan

439. “I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home.”

— Bob Dylan

440. “You’ll find God in the church of your choice, you’ll find Woody Guthrie in the Brooklyn State Hospital.”

— Bob Dylan

441. “The National Bank at profit sells road maps for the soul.”

— Bob Dylan

442. “Done so many evil things in the name of love, it’s a crying shame. I never did see no fire that could put out a flame.”

— Bob Dylan

443. “I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”

— Bob Dylan

444. “What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast. You can’t sleep with it.”

— Bob Dylan

445. “Bullets can harm you and death can disarm you, but no, you will not be deceived. Stripped of all virtue as you crawl through the dirt, you can give but you cannot receive.”

— Bob Dylan

446. “If love is a sin, then beauty is a crime.”

— Bob Dylan

447. “I didn’t know whether to duck or to run, so I ran.”

— Bob Dylan

448. “Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can’t make up their minds and neither can I.”

— Bob Dylan

449. “With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks, you’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books.”

— Bob Dylan

450. “Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder.”

— Bob Dylan