Top 35 Robert Grudin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “True teachers not only impart knowledge and method but awaken the love of learning by their own reflected love.”

— Robert Grudin

2. “We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.”

— Robert Grudin

3. “We pamper the present like a spoiled child, obeying its superficial demands but ignoring its real needs.”

— Robert Grudin

4. “In the landscape of time, there are few locations less comfortable than that of one who waits for some person or event to arrive at some unknown moment in the future.”

— Robert Grudin

5. “Fast drivers can see no further than slow drivers, but they must look further down the road to time their reactions safely. Similarly, people with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in day-to-day concerns.”

— Robert Grudin

6. “At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images; on birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered balloon, the blue sky, the nude figure.”

— Robert Grudin

7. “The future is like the daytime moon, a diffident but faithful companion, so elegant as to be almost invisible, an inconspicuous marvel.”

— Robert Grudin

8. “Creativity is dangerous. We cannot open ourselves to new insights without endangering the security of our prior assumptions. We cannot propose new ideas without risking disapproval and rejection.”

— Robert Grudin

9. “All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.”

— Robert Grudin

10. “No psychological message is so open to question as that which tells us that we have nothing left to do or to give.”

— Robert Grudin

11. “The reason so many promises are not kept is the same as the reason they are made in the first place.”

— Robert Grudin

12. “Such self-transformation is the most difficult and dangerous challenge to the imagination, and it is the most rewarding. Meeting it is only possible for the person whose mind is open to contradictions and well-practiced in free conjecture.”

— Robert Grudin

13. “Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.”

— Robert Grudin

14. “The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves.”

— Robert Grudin

15. “Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.”

— Robert Grudin

16. “We are wistful about the golden days of the past and dream of a distant future unclouded by necessity. But I suspect that if our inner souls were asked what in life they really missed, the answer would be primal danger and stress.”

— Robert Grudin

17. “Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and aspects of it from each position, but never the whole, we must walk mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of metaphor.”

— Robert Grudin

18. “The happy individual is able to renew daily and with full consciousness all the basic expressions of human identity: work, love, communication, play, and rest.”

— Robert Grudin

19. “The extent to which we live from day to day, from week to week, intent on details and oblivious to larger presences, is a gauge of our impoverishment in time.”

— Robert Grudin

20. “The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs.”

— Robert Grudin

21. “Great drama, like the energy implicit in every atom, is eternally around and within us, but liberated only by coincidence, ceremony, creativity, periods reaching completion, pressures reaching the bursting point, and the simple but painful cultivation of awareness.”

— Robert Grudin

22. “We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives.”

— Robert Grudin

23. “You may cure yourself of a depression by forcing yourself to perform, in rapid order and with excruciating concentration, half a dozen or so unpleasant chores, especially if they have long been postponed. This is a kind of homeopathic purgative, a treatment of like with like.”

— Robert Grudin

24. “Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.”

— Robert Grudin

25. “Individuals we consider happy commonly seem complete in the present and we see them constantly in their wholeness: attentive, cheerful, open rather than closed to events, integral in the moment rather than distended across time by regret or anxiety.”

— Robert Grudin

26. “Psychologically time is seldom homogenous but rather is as full of shapes as space.”

— Robert Grudin

27. “Those who labor for bread or money alone are condemned to their reward.”

— Robert Grudin

28. “The mind which can totally and inanely forget its work and obligations is often also the mind which can, at the proper time, give them the fullest attention.”

— Robert Grudin

29. “Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.”

— Robert Grudin

30. “Because we believe that one moment is more or less like the next, we lose touch with the essential urgency of the present, the fact that each passing moment is the one moment for the practice of freedom.”

— Robert Grudin

31. “The recalling of beautiful things, whether they are your own experiences or the acheivements of others, is a creative act. Simple ideas can be restated by rote; but profound ideas must be recreated by will and imagination.”

— Robert Grudin

32. “Few fallacies are more dangerous or easier to fall into than that by which, having read a given book, we assume that we will continue to know its contents permanently, or having mastered a discipline in the past, we assume that we control it in the present. Philosophically speaking, “to learn” is a verb with not legitimate tense.”

— Robert Grudin

33. “Truth is rhythmical: if it implies stasis, it is platitude. Truth is syncopated: if it supplies all the terms, there is one term too many. Truth is barbed: if it comforts, it lies. Truth is an armed dancer.”

— Robert Grudin

34. “On this subject it is striking to note how many individuals pursue, outside of their own professions and with a kind of rebellious delight, hobbies that are no more than personalized forms of work. This suggests that one of the hidden desires of humanity, provoked by the inward clamor of unused potentialities, is the dream of work in freedom.”

— Robert Grudin

35. “Every home should have a room, or at least a nook with two chairs, where it is a sin punishable by immediate expulsion to speak of money, business, politics or the state of one’s teeth.”

— Robert Grudin

36. “Because it is a radical act of freedom, creative achievement is a heroic process that requires, in all its permutations, specific strengths of character.”

— Robert Grudin

37. “We wonder at good things, are appalled by evil. What’s wondering got in common with being appalled? That strange combination, that surprise duet of disbelief and acknowledgement. You can’t believe that any human being would open up with an assault gun in a trolley, but look over there – right there! – there’s somebody doing it.”

— Robert Grudin