Top 100 Norton Juster Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “So many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.”

— Norton Juster

2. “You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet.”

— Norton Juster

3. “The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.”

— Norton Juster

4. “The more you want, the less you get, and the less you get, the more you have.”

— Norton Juster

5. “Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.”

— Norton Juster

6. “Just because you have a choice, it doesn’t mean that any of them ‘has’ to be right.”

— Norton Juster

7. “Every sunrise gives you a new beginning and a new ending. Let this morning be a new beginning to a better relationship and a new ending to the bad memories. Its an opportunity to enjoy life, breathe freely, think and love. Be grateful for this beautiful day.”

— Norton Juster

8. “Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things. – Humbug.”

— Norton Juster

9. “What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.”

— Norton Juster

10. “Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.”

— Norton Juster

11. “The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what’s in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.”

— Norton Juster

12. “Whether or not you find your own way, you’re bound to find some way. If you happen to find my way, please return it, as it was lost years ago. I imagine by now it’s quite rusty.”

— Norton Juster

13. “It’s bad enough wasting time without killing it.”

— Norton Juster

14. “Sometimes I find the best way of getting from one place to another is simply to erase everything and begin again.”

— Norton Juster

15. “There are good books and there are bad books, period, that’s the distinction.”

— Norton Juster

16. “There are no wrong roads to anywhere.”

— Norton Juster

17. “I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit.”

— Norton Juster

18. “What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.”

— Norton Juster

19. “The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.”

— Norton Juster

20. “Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you’re going.”

— Norton Juster

21. “Expect everything so that nothing comes unexpected.”

— Norton Juster

22. “If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won’t have the time. For there’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren’t for that dreadful magic staff, you’d never know how much time you were wasting.”

— Norton Juster

23. “Infinity is a dreadfully poor place. They can never manage to make ends meet.”

— Norton Juster

24. “The Doldrums, my young friend, are where nothing ever happens and nothing ever changes.”

— Norton Juster

25. “A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.”

— Norton Juster

26. “Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”

— Norton Juster

27. “And you only have one face.” “Is that bad?” asked Milo, making sure it was still there. “You’ll soon wear it out using it for everything,” replied the Dodecahedron.”

— Norton Juster

28. “I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.”

— Norton Juster

29. “You see, to tall men I’m a midget, and to short men I’m a giant; to the skinny ones I’m a fat man, and to the fat ones I’m a thin man.”

— Norton Juster

30. “Do you think it will rain? Milo: But I thought you were the Weather Man? No, I’m the Whether man, for it is more important to know whether there will be weather, whether than what the weather will be.”

— Norton Juster

31. “Words and numbers are of equal value, for in the cloak of knowledge one is warp and the other woof.”

— Norton Juster

32. “We’re right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it’s a matter of not knowing where you aren’t – and I don’t care at all about where I’m not.”

— Norton Juster

33. “It’s more important to know whether there will be weather, than what the weather will be.”

— Norton Juster

34. “Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?”

— Norton Juster

35. “If you want sense, you’ll have to make it yourself.”

— Norton Juster

36. “There is much worth noticing that often escapes the eye.”

— Norton Juster

37. “You often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than right for the wrong reasons.”

— Norton Juster

38. “Just as I thought: boys are the cause of everything.”

— Norton Juster

39. “Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things? You’d have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four’s name were Albert, things would be hopeless.”

— Norton Juster

40. “As you can see, that leaves almost no time for brooding, lagging, plodding, or procrastinating, and if we stopped to think or laugh, we’d never get nothing done.” “You mean you’d never get anything done,” corrected Milo. “We don’t want to get anything done,” snapped another angrily; “we want to get nothing done, and we can do that without your help.”

— Norton Juster

41. “For an instant there was an ominous stillness, quieter and more silent than ever before, as if even the air was holding its breath.”

— Norton Juster

42. “But I suppose there’s a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open.”

— Norton Juster

43. “You can’t improve sound by having only silence. The problem is to use each at the proper time.”

— Norton Juster

44. “Perhaps someday you can have one city as easy to see as Illusions and as hard to forget as Reality.”

— Norton Juster

45. “Why not? That’s a good reason for almost anything – a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.”

— Norton Juster

46. “I don’t know of any wrong road to Dictionopolis, so if this road goes to Dictionopolis at all it must be the right road, and if it doesn’t it must be the right road to somewhere else, because there are no wrong roads to anywhere. Do you think it will rain?”

— Norton Juster

47. “Being lost is not a matter of knowing where you are. It’s a matter of knowing where you aren’t.”

— Norton Juster

48. “You see, years ago I was just an ordinary bee minding my own business, smelling flowers all day, and occasionally picking up part-time work in people’s bonnets. Then one day I realized that I’d never amount to anything without an education and, being naturally adept at spelling, I decided that –.”

— Norton Juster

49. “Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best.”

— Norton Juster

50. “People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I’ve never heard of.”

— Norton Juster