Top 80 Jackson Browne Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them.”

— Jackson Browne

2. “We may lose and we may win, but we will never be here again.”

— Jackson Browne

3. “Lighten up while you still can, don’t even try to understand. Just find a place to make your stand, and take it easy.”

— Jackson Browne

4. “Forget what life used to be, you are what you choose to be. It’s whatever it is you see that life will become.”

— Jackson Browne

5. “You would think with all the genius and the brilliance of these times, we might find a higher purpose and a better use of mind.”

— Jackson Browne

6. “I’ve been aware of the time passing by they say in the end it’s the wink of an eye and when the morning light comes streaming in you’ll get up and do it again.”

— Jackson Browne

7. “I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, it could be that I’ve lost my way.”

— Jackson Browne

8. “Let the disappointments pass, let the laughter fill your glass.”

— Jackson Browne

9. “Let the music keep our spirits high, let the buildings keep our children dry, let creation reveal its secrets by and bye.”

— Jackson Browne

10. “Somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go may lie a reason you were alive, but you’ll never know.”

— Jackson Browne

11. “Take it easy, take it easyDon’t let the sound of your own wheelsDrive you crazy.”

— Jackson Browne

12. “Caught between the longing for love, and the struggle for the legal tender, where the sirens sing and the church bells ring, and the junk man pounds his fender. Where the veterans dream of the fight, fast asleep at the traffic light, and the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor.”

— Jackson Browne

13. “Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels. Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields.”

— Jackson Browne

14. “And while the future’s there for anyone to change, still you know it’s seems, It would be easier sometimes to change the past.”

— Jackson Browne

15. “I want to find myself a girl who can show me what laughter means, and we’ll fill in the missing numbers in each others paint-by-numbers dreams.”

— Jackson Browne

16. “No matter how close to yours another’s steps have grown, in the end there is one dance you’ll do alone.”

— Jackson Browne

17. “But when you know that you’ve got a real friend somewhere, suddenly all the others are so much easier to bear.”

— Jackson Browne

18. “Out into the cool of the evening strolls the pretender. He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there.”

— Jackson Browne

19. “I’m going to be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender.”

— Jackson Browne

20. “Oh Lord, are there really people starving still?”

— Jackson Browne

21. “You measure peace with guns, progress in megatons. Who’s left when the war is won?”

— Jackson Browne

22. “I don’t know where I’m running now, I’m just running on.”

— Jackson Browne

23. “I taught myself to play the piano, because I wanted to play it.”

— Jackson Browne

24. “Coffee in the morning, cocaine afternoons.”

— Jackson Browne

25. “Say a prayer for the pretender, who started out so young and strong only to surrender.”

— Jackson Browne

Featured in: Strong Quotes

26. “People stand themselves next to the righteous They believe the things they say are true They speak in terms of what divides us To justify the violence they do But it is one, it is one One world spinning ’round the sun Wherever it is you call home Whatever country you come from It is one.”

— Jackson Browne

27. “The first to come and the last to go, working for that minimum wage.”

— Jackson Browne

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

28. “These days I seem to think about the things I forgot to do for you and all the times I had a chance to.”

— Jackson Browne

29. “Into a dancer you have grown from the seeds somebody else has sown.”

— Jackson Browne

30. “In the end, they traded their tired wings for the resignation that living brings. And exchanged love’s bright and fragile glow for the glitter and the rouge, and in the moment they were swept before the deluge.”

— Jackson Browne

31. “People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they are not on your road does not mean they have gotten lost.”

— Jackson Browne

32. “I’ve also gotten to play in front of a million people in Central Park when there was a grass roots movement calling for nuclear disarmament – it was about 1982 – they called it Peace Sunday.”

— Jackson Browne

33. “I’m sensitive, you know, about some things, and as some of my partners could attest to, incredibly insensitive.”

— Jackson Browne

34. “You can take as much as you can from the generation that has preceded you, but then it’s up to you to make something new.”

— Jackson Browne

35. “That’s maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things.”

— Jackson Browne

36. “Very often it’s really inconvenient – who you fall in love with. You can’t really control it.”

— Jackson Browne

37. “Famine and disaster, right there in front of you, and the more you watch, the less you do.”

— Jackson Browne

38. “Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that’s instructive to yourself – some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn’t have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that’s what’s happening in the song.”

— Jackson Browne

39. “How long will it be ’till we’ve turned To the tasks and the skills That we’ll have to have learned If we’re going to find our place in the future And have something to offer Where this planet’s concerned?”

— Jackson Browne

40. “They sell us the President the same way they sell us our clothes and cars.”

— Jackson Browne

41. “Got seven women on my mind. Four that want to own me, two that want to stone me, and one says she’s a friend of mine.”

— Jackson Browne

42. “People look around you, the signs are everywhere. You’ve left it for somebody other than you to be the one who to care.”

— Jackson Browne

43. “I look around for the friends I used to turn to pull me through. Looking into their eyes, I see them running, too.”

— Jackson Browne

44. “I’m gonna be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender. Where the ads take aim and lay their claim to the heart and the soul of the spender. And believe in whatever may lie in those things that money can buy, though true love could have been a contender.”

— Jackson Browne

45. “I followed those highway signs and I’ve run down those thin white lines.”

— Jackson Browne

46. “No matter how fast I run, I can’t get away from me.”

— Jackson Browne

47. “Doctor, my eyes cannot see the sky. Is this the prize for having learned how not to cry?”

— Jackson Browne

48. “I was doing my best Bogart, but I was having trouble getting into her jeans.”

— Jackson Browne

49. “I wrote the song For A Dancer for a friend of mine who died in a fire. He was in the sauna in a house that burned down, so he had no idea anything was going on. It was very sad.”

— Jackson Browne

50. “How long can you hear someone crying – how long can you hear someone dying – before you ask yourself why?”

— Jackson Browne