Top 40 Spider Robinson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.”

— Spider Robinson

2. “Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.”

— Spider Robinson

3. “We are all time travelers moving at the speed of exactly 60 minutes per hour.”

— Spider Robinson

4. “I’m going to live forever, or die trying !”

— Spider Robinson

5. “Anger is always – always – fear in disguise.”

— Spider Robinson

6. “If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.”

— Spider Robinson

7. “You know what gives me the courage to keep on living? The courage to love myself a little? It’s having a whole bunch of friends who really give a goddamn. When you share pain, there’s less of it, and when you share joy, there’s more of it.”

— Spider Robinson

8. “To be human : to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.”

— Spider Robinson

9. “The whole world turns upside down in ten years, but you turn upside down with it.”

— Spider Robinson

10. “Euphemisms are for the differently brained.”

— Spider Robinson

11. “Dreams should be forgotten when we wake. Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep.”

— Spider Robinson

12. “There’s a price for absolution on this planet, and it’s called penance.”

— Spider Robinson

13. “To all the Callahan’s Places there ever were or ever will be, whatever they may be called – and to all the merry maniacs and happy fools who are fortunate enough to stumble into one: may none of them arrive too late!”

— Spider Robinson

14. “She danced because she needed to. She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.”

— Spider Robinson

15. “And there’s this place called college! I mean, they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don’t care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street!”

— Spider Robinson

16. “Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.”

— Spider Robinson

17. “It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?”

— Spider Robinson

18. “Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I’d rather be. So do my friends.”

— Spider Robinson

19. “A beginning is the end of something, always.”

— Spider Robinson

20. “Sexual intercourse vests no property rights.”

— Spider Robinson

21. “It’s always coldest before the warm.”

— Spider Robinson

22. “Information can’t be put in any container that isn’t leaky.”

— Spider Robinson

23. “A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman.”

— Spider Robinson

24. “Man, you’re no smarter than me. You’re just a fancier kind of stupid.”

— Spider Robinson

25. “Callahan dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain.”

— Spider Robinson

26. “The day Apollo 11 landed, I knew men would walk on Mars in my lifetime. I’m no longer nearly so sure. The last budget put forward in Canada contained not a penny for Mars.”

— Spider Robinson

27. “And I repeat: if there is anything that can divert the land of my birth from its current stampede into the Stone Age, it is the widespread dissemination of the thoughts and perceptions that Robert Heinlein has been selling as entertainment since 1939.”

— Spider Robinson

28. “She was black and a woman and scarred, and as the thought formed in our minds we realized that it was a redundancy. Her scar was visible externally, was all.”

— Spider Robinson

29. “Now that I finally have the time for it, this web surfing stuff turns out to be as interesting and fun and addictive as you’ve all been telling me. Zipping from link to link, chasing an idea across the noosphere, sucking up information like a killer whale – way cool.”

— Spider Robinson

30. “And I’m a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?”

— Spider Robinson

31. “You become uneasy with people in direct proportion to how many lies you have to keep track of in their presence.”

— Spider Robinson

32. “It’s a rare hurt that can stand under the advice, help, and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they’ve been coming around long enough, they find they don’t need to drink any more.”

— Spider Robinson

33. “Doc Webster’s eyes rolled briefly, like loaded dice, and came up snake eyes.”

— Spider Robinson

34. “Librarians are like crack dealers when it comes to hooking small children.”

— Spider Robinson

35. “Time didn’t pass; it tailgated.”

— Spider Robinson

36. “Perhaps you’ve heard the one about the difference between a bass player and a large pepperoni pizza? The pizza can feed a family of four. I.”

— Spider Robinson

37. “Art takes whatever – and as long as – it takes.”

— Spider Robinson

38. “What shocked us the most was that we had no idea why we should be so shocked. Like opening a ginger ale and finding Jamesons’ inside: nothing wrong with it, but it sort of takes you by surprise.”

— Spider Robinson

39. “The delusion that one’s sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim’s fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.”

— Spider Robinson

40. “We did make use, from time to time, of candles, neckties, scarves, shoelaces, a little water-color paintbrush, her hairbrush, butter, whipped cream, strawberry jam, Johnson’s Baby Oil, my Swedish hand vibrator, a fascinating bead necklace she had, miscellaneous common household items, and every molecule of flesh that was exposed to air or could be located with strenuous search.”

— Spider Robinson

41. “Certainly, all of us at Callahan’s were heir to the tradition of the B-movie – and the A-movie for that matter – that any female who enters your life in a dramatic manner must be your fated love.”

— Spider Robinson

42. “I conclude you must be a natural horses’s ass.”

— Spider Robinson

43. “Am I finally addressing a sentient being?”

— Spider Robinson