Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.”

— Tom Robbins

102. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

105. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

110. “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

111. “Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.”

— Tom Robbins

112. “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

113. “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

114. “The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized.”

— Tom Robbins

115. “The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.”

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

120. “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

121. “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

122. “People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they’re scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements.”

— Tom Robbins

123. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

126. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

130. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

132. “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

133. “Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.”

— Tom Robbins

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

141. “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

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

145. “We only rise above mediocrity when there’s something at stake. p. 174.”

— Tom Robbins

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

— Tom Robbins

147. “Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.”

— Tom Robbins

148. “From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.”

— Tom Robbins

149. “To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar.”

— Tom Robbins

150. “Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for “making poetry” is the same as the verb “to breathe.”

— Tom Robbins