Top 50 Dan Groat Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Memories with laughter are the best ones to keep.”

— Dan Groat

2. “A hopeful journey is more important than the destination.”

— Dan Groat

3. “We lose keys and we find keys and we get new keys. We just have to find the ones that unlock the right doors. Sometimes, we have keys, but we don’t know what door they fit. That can be the hardest part, putting the right key in the right door.”

— Dan Groat

4. “Music is the sound of unspoken thoughts.”

— Dan Groat

5. “Devotion to self is necessary. First, place the mask on yourself and breathe deeply. Then help the others. If you don’t save yourself, they will die.”

— Dan Groat

6. “We who are dreamers and doers want only the chance to dream and do, to have an idea and to try to carry it out without interference.”

— Dan Groat

7. “Don’t ever use a shovel to swat a fly.”

— Dan Groat

8. “Being tough today might cause you to be weak in the future.”

— Dan Groat

9. “One of the worst things I’ve learned about getting older is that there seems to be more change that you don’t like than there was when you were younger and you can’t do nothin’ about it.”

— Dan Groat

10. “It’s a funny thing, one day you’re living and the next day you’re not sometimes, whether you have plans or not. Wishes and wants get trumped by the reaper every time. I don’t even know if I would want a warning if it was my time. I think I’d rather be surprised.”

— Dan Groat

11. “Evil won’t leave you alone until you take a stand or until you’re dead.”

— Dan Groat

12. “I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.”

— Dan Groat

13. “When you’re anonymous, other opinions shrink next to the sounds in your own head.”

— Dan Groat

14. “Seek until there is no hope and then seek further. Seek without end. Trudge on without tiring and without fear and without disheartenment. Trudge on, for it is within you to fight any enemy. It is who you are. It is your past and your present and your future. You will not quit. You cannot quit. Your breath is your courage, and as you breathe, so must you hope or you are already dead.”

— Dan Groat

15. “The world bein’ so small ain’t always a good thing for those of us who ain’t searchin’ for new and different stuff.”

— Dan Groat

16. “If the forest has a day of fire and the heat of the flames does not consume a special tree, it will still be changed; charred, but still standing.”

— Dan Groat

17. “As you get older, you have to be willing and able to choose your own path for your life. And once you choose it, you walk it with strength. If you meet evil along the way, know that it is supposed to make you afraid, but it’s not supposed to stop you. You walk through the fear and you walk through the evil, and you don’t let either one become your master.”

— Dan Groat

18. “There’s nothing wrong with fighting when you have no choice. As a matter of fact, it’s what you should do, but when you fight, fight to win.”

— Dan Groat

19. “There is a silent deference for one another, a distance that is kept, and lines that aren’t crossed, but in their sharing, they each try to pay tribute to the bond in their own way. As often as possible, they open up a little and give what they can.”

— Dan Groat

20. “They may not have enough of their own to take a stand, but they can do it if someone shows them how.”

— Dan Groat

21. “What a wonderful sadness to miss the one you have loved forever, it seems, and know that she is waiting at home.”

— Dan Groat

22. “If all you do is think about what you need, you’re no better than an animal in the woods, and no smarter either. To be human, you’ve got to want. It makes you smarter and stronger.”

— Dan Groat

23. “A person gets built and stands for a few years and then nature’s demolition team comes in.”

— Dan Groat

24. “The weak thrive on indulgence.”

— Dan Groat

25. “Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.”

— Dan Groat

26. “Surviving is about need. Living is about want.”

— Dan Groat

27. “What kind of country has this become? Decent people can’t do anything without being watched.”

— Dan Groat

28. “People don’t die so the universe can gauge your reaction. They die because life is finite.”

— Dan Groat

29. “Despite his best efforts, maintaining dignity in a head attached to an unclean body wrapped in unclean garments was a battle that encouraged surrender.”

— Dan Groat

30. “We are born among relatives. Family is defined by loyalty.”

— Dan Groat

31. “Just make sure the day doesn’t pass without sayin’ what’s in your heart. Sometimes you pass up those chances and they’re gone forever.”

— Dan Groat

32. “The bones of the oak tree that had stood by the spring branch during my youth were scattered about the ground, pieces of the skeleton of a majestic life that had passed while I was off growing up and old.”

— Dan Groat

33. “Governments have absolutely no interest in self-reliance. It defeats one of the purposes for their existence. They encourage and thrive on dependency. The more of it they sell, the more necessary they are, and the more power and money they need.”

— Dan Groat

34. “There are struggles you cannot win, but a man can meet his own heart if value is found in loss. Give yourself permission to cry.”

— Dan Groat

35. “The true soldier knows nothing but war, and the true soldier, for lack of an enemy, attacks himself.”

— Dan Groat

36. “It seems to me that smart people seem to know things and wise people know how to use what they know. Smart is a big help to a man; wise is a big help to lots of men.”

— Dan Groat

37. “Everybody dies. It’s no risk to lose your life. You knew it was lost from the beginning.”

— Dan Groat

38. “Saying it ain’t fair, over and over again while you stand in front of a wrecking ball is kinda senseless, I think.”

— Dan Groat

39. “I’m not lookin’ to be anybody’s keeper. What I say and do is meant to protect me. If it works for somebody else, that’s okay, but I don’t want people depending on me to save them.”

— Dan Groat

40. “Books required no interchanges of thoughts and feelings, no trading of expectations, no traffic of words, no menace of real loss. Reading books required far less energy than reading people; the pages seldom disappointed him and they never died.”

— Dan Groat

41. “As an adult I had mastered the art of looking without seeing and listening without hearing and eating without tasting and maybe even existing without living.”

— Dan Groat

42. “We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world.”

— Dan Groat

43. “In this country our principles should not be silent.”

— Dan Groat

44. “I don’t know how a reporter would ever understand a politician. Your job is supposed to be about finding the truth and enlightening people. Right? A politician’s job is about hiding the truth and fooling people. Right? You want us to be better informed so we get smarter. They think we’re dumb and it’s to their advantage to keep us that way.”

— Dan Groat

45. “We get so beat down by what we need, sometimes we forget how to want.”

— Dan Groat

46. “This country should treat good people better than they do.”

— Dan Groat

47. “Not interested in scarin’ anybody, but people with good sense are afraid of a man with nothin’ to lose.”

— Dan Groat

48. “The world has a way of dragging down our mood.”

— Dan Groat

49. “Sometimes when the three of us were together on our own, we would have a good time. I was pretty young, but sometimes we would go off in the woods and build forts and fight Indians and I think things were about as close to fine as they ever got right then during those times. In the woods. No parents. No yelling.”

— Dan Groat

50. “I don’t have to save them all, just a few, or one, and then that one has to go out and save another one until this half-dead world begins to climb out of the grave it’s standing in waiting for someone to throw dirt on it.”

— Dan Groat