Top 500 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

52. “Don’t be reckless with other peoples hearts. And don’t put up with people that are reckless with yours.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

53. “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

54. “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

55. “I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

56. “When everything was beautiful and nothing hurt...”

— Kurt Vonnegut

57. “So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

58. “No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

59. “Love is where you find it.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

60. “Educate yourself, welcome life’s messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

61. “The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

62. “Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We’ve destroyed our planet.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

63. “Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

64. “When the last living thing Has died on account of us, How poetical it would be If Earth could say, In a voice floating up Perhaps From the floor Of the Grand Canyon, “It is done.” People did not like it here.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

65. “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

66. “You should be careful about who you pretend to be, because who you pretend to be – is actually who you are!”

— Kurt Vonnegut

67. “Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

68. “If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

69. “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

70. “I wish we had all been born birds instead.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

71. “We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

72. “I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

73. “I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

74. “There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

75. “I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

76. “I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

77. “The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

78. “Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

79. “The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

80. “Do I resent rich people? No. The best or worst I can do is notice them. I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

81. “The triumph of anything is a matter of organization.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

82. “Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

83. “Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

84. “There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

85. “Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”

— Kurt Vonnegut

86. “All this happened, more or less.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

87. “Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

88. “About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

89. “Music is, to me, proof of the existence of God. It is so extraordinarily full of magic, and in tough times of my life I can listen to music and it makes such a difference.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

90. “Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

91. “Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow...”

— Kurt Vonnegut

92. “Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

93. “This is a nation tragedy, of course – that we’ve changed from a society to an audience.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

94. “A man without a home can’t be lost.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

95. “You become who you pretend to be.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

96. “The champagne was dead. So it goes.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

97. “That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

98. “The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

99. “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

100. “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.”

— Kurt Vonnegut