Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “The most useful thing about art is it’s uselessness.”

— Tom Robbins

102. “Eighty percent of love is smell.”

— Tom Robbins

103. “Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy.”

— Tom Robbins

104. “We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we’ve forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That’s why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.”

— Tom Robbins

105. “There is no such thing as a weird human being, It’s just that some people require more understanding than others.”

— Tom Robbins

106. “Death is not a resident of the house. ‘Death’ is merely the name we give to certain rooms of the house, rooms that we, the so-called ‘living,’ fear for the simple reason that we have not passed through them.”

— Tom Robbins

107. “At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage.”

— Tom Robbins

108. “I’ve sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees.”

— Tom Robbins

109. “Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.”

— Tom Robbins

110. “All a person can do in this life is gather about him his integrity, his imagination, and his individuality – and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.”

— Tom Robbins

111. “Be your own flying saucer! Rescue yourself!”

— Tom Robbins

112. “When we accept small wonders, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders.”

— Tom Robbins

113. “Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.”

— Tom Robbins

114. “A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”

— Tom Robbins

115. “Most people do not have the guts to direct their own movie – let alone star in it.”

— Tom Robbins

116. “Faith is believing in something you know isn’t true.”

— Tom Robbins

117. “Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise.”

— Tom Robbins

118. “Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.”

— Tom Robbins

119. “When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.”

— Tom Robbins

120. “I have always been a romantic, one of those people who believes that a woman in pink circus tights contains all the secrets of the universe.”

— Tom Robbins

121. “Never be afraid to love, not even when there’s a chance you’re not being loved in return.”

— Tom Robbins

122. “I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.”

— Tom Robbins

123. “Life is too small a container for certain individuals. Some of them, such as Alobar, huff and puff and try to expand the container. Others, such as Kudra, seek to pry the lid off and hop out.”

— Tom Robbins

124. “This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.”

— Tom Robbins

125. “To be or not to be isn’t the question. The question is how to prolong being.”

— Tom Robbins

126. “Of course I’m inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!”

— Tom Robbins

127. “Long as you’re not afraid, nobody can run your life for you. Remember that. Hell is being scared of things.”

— Tom Robbins

128. “There’re many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they’re victims.”

— Tom Robbins

129. “When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.”

— Tom Robbins

130. “Some marriages are made in heaven, Mine was made in Hong Kong, by the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at Kmart.”

— Tom Robbins

131. “They glared at her the way any intelligent persons ought to glare when what they need is a smoke, a bite, a cup of coffee, a piece of ass, or a good fast-paced story, and all they’re getting is philosophy.”

— Tom Robbins

132. “If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn’t it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?”

— Tom Robbins

133. “Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever – which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes.”

— Tom Robbins

134. “The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.”

— Tom Robbins

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

135. “Dreams don’t come true. Dreams are true.”

— Tom Robbins

136. “Just because you’re naked doesn’t mean you’re sexy. Just because you’re cynical doesn’t mean you’re cool.”

— Tom Robbins

137. “The beet is the most intense of vegetables.”

— Tom Robbins

138. “Approfondement is a French word that means ‘playing easily in the deep.’”

— Tom Robbins

139. “Who knows how to make love stay? Tell love you are going to the Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half.”

— Tom Robbins

140. “Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water.”

— Tom Robbins

141. “When life demands more of people than they demand of life – as is ordinarily the case – what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death.”

— Tom Robbins

142. “Should a person possess a heart that is as light as a feather, then that person is granted immortality.”

— Tom Robbins

143. “What mattered to Abu was the music of the sentence. ‘A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.’ To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti.”

— Tom Robbins

144. “The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off.”

— Tom Robbins

145. “The stiff-witted and academic seem not to comprehend that it is entirely possible to be ironic and sincere at the same instant, that a knowing tongue in cheek does not necessarily preclude an affectionate glow in heart.”

— Tom Robbins

146. “There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong.”

— Tom Robbins

147. “The trouble with the fast lane is that all the movement is horizontal. And I like to go vertical sometimes.”

— Tom Robbins

148. “There are essential and inessential insanities. The later are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon.”

— Tom Robbins

149. “Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night.”

— Tom Robbins

Featured in: Fun Quotes

150. “And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept the unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe- and go on about our tasks.”

— Tom Robbins