Top 35 Rod McKuen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Strangers are just friends waiting to happen.”

— Rod McKuen

2. “We come into the world alone. We go away the same. We’re meant to spend the interlude between in closeness or so we tell ourselves. But it’s a long way from the morning to the evening.”

— Rod McKuen

3. “I’ve been going a long time now along the way I’ve learned some things. You have to make the good times yourself take the little times and make them into big times and save the times that are all right for the ones that aren’t so good.”

— Rod McKuen

4. “If I could do it over, I’d do better.”

— Rod McKuen

5. “If you love somebody, tell them.”

— Rod McKuen

6. “Be gentle with me, new love. Treat me tenderly. I need the gentle touch, the soft voice, the candlelight after nine. There’s been so many who didn’t understand so give me all the love I see in your timid eyes but give it gently Please.”

— Rod McKuen

7. “Watch the indolent butterfly playing on the tall flower in the yard and think about the sun going down. It always does you know.”

— Rod McKuen

8. “I’ve come to terms with it, it knows I know.”

— Rod McKuen

9. “Never fear being alone, because you never are.”

— Rod McKuen

10. “I have never known a cat that couldn’t quiet me down just by walking slowly past my chair.”

— Rod McKuen

11. “The journey back is always longer than the forward run.”

— Rod McKuen

12. “I am not a joiner. Somewhere I once said that people join clubs now for the very reason they once carried them, a need for security. Maybe I’m alone more often than I should be, because I try to find security within myself.”

— Rod McKuen

13. “Love is a sweet thing caught a momentand held in a golden eye.”

— Rod McKuen

14. “Once I thought ideas were exceptions not the rule. That is not so. Ideas are so plentiful that they ride on air. You have only to reach out and snatch one.”

— Rod McKuen

15. “Everybody has the answers or they’ll make them up for you. Just once I’d like to hear a brand-new question.”

— Rod McKuen

16. “There is no other way to find ourselves but in each others faces.”

— Rod McKuen

17. “Extending your hand is extending yourself.”

— Rod McKuen

18. “No map to help us find the tranquil flat lands, clearings calm, fields without mean fences. Rolling down the other side of life our compass is the sureness of ourselves. Time may make us rugged, ragged round the edges, but know and understand that love is still the safest place to land.”

— Rod McKuen

19. “Poetry is fact given over to imagery.”

— Rod McKuen

20. “The world needs writers. We will always be necessary. There are few professions that can claim that distinction.”

— Rod McKuen

21. “It happens just because we need to want and to be wanted too, when love is here or gone to lie down in the darkness and listen to the warm.”

— Rod McKuen

22. “It’s nice sometimes to open up the heart a little and let some hurt come in. It proves you’re still alive.”

— Rod McKuen

23. “Cats have it all – admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it.”

— Rod McKuen

24. “Unless you call attention to your presence who will know you’re there? Even a country has to weave and wave a flag as proof of its existence.”

— Rod McKuen

25. “There’s no misery in not being loved, only in not loving.”

— Rod McKuen

26. “May your hand be full for always if only with another hand. May your heart be empty only long enough to give you cause to fill it up again with love. May your soul be lost by you only to be found by God.”

— Rod McKuen

27. “Even when you feel you’ve reached the end or edge of life, hold on. Life itself will ultimately take care of you.”

— Rod McKuen

28. “People are not born bastards. They have to work at it.”

— Rod McKuen

29. “I chose the shadows; they did not choose me. I stay here securely not just because I feel plain, but because disappearance is by now the easy way. The habit. The worn path that I can trod knowingly and be assured safe passage home.”

— Rod McKuen

30. “To understand others you should get behind their eyes and walk down their spines.”

— Rod McKuen

31. “The gifts that one receives for giving are so immeasurable that it is almost an injustice to accept them.”

— Rod McKuen

32. “I cannot speculate on what our cluttered mind will save- sleepy Sundays, or a nosebleed after love. I know only the dying heart needs the nourishment of memory to live beyond too many winters.”

— Rod McKuen

33. “We will all wake up semi-angels, If we wake at all.”

— Rod McKuen

34. “People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I’m Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.”

— Rod McKuen

35. “A poet can’t afford to be aloof. The tools of his trade are the people he bumps up against.”

— Rod McKuen

36. “Laws and machines are shaped to fit the classes.”

— Rod McKuen