Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.”

— Ray Bradbury

452. “We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.”

— Ray Bradbury

453. “They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won’t run on. They don’t know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it’ll have to hit.”

— Ray Bradbury

454. “When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people.”

— Ray Bradbury

455. “Touch a scientist and you touch a child.”

— Ray Bradbury

456. “He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.”

— Ray Bradbury

457. “It learned you can’t love anything too much in this world.”

— Ray Bradbury

458. “He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.”

— Ray Bradbury

459. “When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they! – when you were off to Tanganyika in ’98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?”

— Ray Bradbury

460. “That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”

— Ray Bradbury

461. “Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.”

— Ray Bradbury

462. “My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.”

— Ray Bradbury

463. “Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this so the sadness could not hurt.”

— Ray Bradbury

464. “We meet on the common ground of an uncommon age and share out our gifts of dark and light, good and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow.”

— Ray Bradbury

465. “Can’t you recognize the human in the inhuman?”

— Ray Bradbury

466. “Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.”

— Ray Bradbury

467. “It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.”

— Ray Bradbury

468. “Melt all the guns, I thought, break the knives, burn the guillotines-and the malicious will still write letters that kill.”

— Ray Bradbury

469. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

— Ray Bradbury

470. “Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”

— Ray Bradbury

471. “That’s the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and WORTH the doing.”

— Ray Bradbury

472. “How’s Uncle Louis today?” “Who?” “And Aunt Maude?”

— Ray Bradbury

473. “Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.”

— Ray Bradbury

474. “Each person was himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid, always alone. If I should scream, if I should call for help, would anyone hear would it even matter?”

— Ray Bradbury

475. “Let me alone, said Mildred. I didn’t do anything. Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. how long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

— Ray Bradbury

476. “Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.”

— Ray Bradbury

477. “Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.”

— Ray Bradbury

478. “Once the bomb release was yanked, it was finished. Now, a full three seconds, all of the time in history, before the bombs struck, the enemy ships themselves were gone half around the visible world, like bullets in which a savage islander might not believe because they were invisible; yet the heart is suddenly shattered, the body falls in separate motions, and the blood is astonished to be freed on the air; the brain squanders its few precious memories and, puzzled, dies.”

— Ray Bradbury

479. “I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.”

— Ray Bradbury

480. “And suddenly everything, absolutely everything, was there.”

— Ray Bradbury

481. “The Greek philosophies teach us that we are a combination of dark and light, good and evil, and murderer and savior, hmm? And until we know this completely about ourselves we cannot love well, and we cannot forgive ourselves.”

— Ray Bradbury

482. “I was only kicking down the Christmas tree to get the star on top.”

— Ray Bradbury

483. “Writing is like sex. You have to save your love for the love object. If you go around spouting about your idea, there’ll be no “charge” left. You can’t father children that way.”

— Ray Bradbury

484. “I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.”

— Ray Bradbury

485. “I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That’s immortality. That’s the only immortality I care about.”

— Ray Bradbury

486. “My uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn’t kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility, my uncle says.”

— Ray Bradbury

487. “The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us, Mr. Valery once said.”

— Ray Bradbury

488. “Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity.”

— Ray Bradbury

489. “Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones.”

— Ray Bradbury

490. “Those women like to see their tongues dance.”

— Ray Bradbury

491. “If we try to deny the darkness in our souls then we’ll become completely dark.”

— Ray Bradbury

492. “And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world there was no longer need of firemen for the old purpose. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors.”

— Ray Bradbury

493. “We are anthill men upon an anthill world.”

— Ray Bradbury

494. “How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt?”

— Ray Bradbury

495. “All of us, no matter how we look born into this world, feel something like the Hunchback. It doesn’t matter if you have a beautiful face or not.”

— Ray Bradbury

496. “Most of my stories are ideas in action. In other words, I get a concept, and I let it run away. I find a character to act out the idea. And then the story takes care of itself.”

— Ray Bradbury

497. “My job is to help you fall in love.”

— Ray Bradbury

498. “I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”

— Ray Bradbury

499. “Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.”

— Ray Bradbury

500. “I don’t decide. My secret self decides. I just go with my subconscious. If it wants to do a poem, I do a poem, and if it wants to do a play, I do a play. So I’m not in charge, I’m not in control.”

— Ray Bradbury