Top 500 Tom Robbins Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Women are tough and rather coarse. They were built for the raw, crude work of bearing children. You’d be amazed at what they can do when they divert that baby-hatching energy into some other enterprise.”

— Tom Robbins

302. “Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air – moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh – felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.”

— Tom Robbins

303. “In a patriarchal society, the abiding sexuality of the healthy female was obliged to wear a prim disguise.”

— Tom Robbins

304. “Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.”

— Tom Robbins

305. “Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned.”

— Tom Robbins

306. “True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced.”

— Tom Robbins

307. “How different conditions would be today in the Middle East, how much saner and safer the entire earth might be, had those Christians not defiled a civilization too advanced for their arrogant little minds to understand.”

— Tom Robbins

308. “How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding... are simply inauthentic... But there are folks who know and aren’t afraid to look and won’t turn tail should they find it – and if they never do, they’ll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth or the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of earth’s sweet gas.”

— Tom Robbins

309. “There is a sense in which a painted stick is a stick in bloom. This stick points to the hidden face of God. Sometimes it points to you.”

— Tom Robbins

310. “A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes.”

— Tom Robbins

311. “The human race has always defined itself through narration. That isn’t going to change just because we’ve gone electronic. What is changing is that now we’re allowing corporations to tell our stories for us.”

— Tom Robbins

312. “I asked Mr. Wrangle what you were like. He said you were hornet juice and rosebuds in a container of gazelle meat.”

— Tom Robbins

313. “The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged.”

— Tom Robbins

314. “Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.”

— Tom Robbins

315. “The first thunderstorm of the season was in the dressing room, donning its black robes and its necklace of hailstones, strapping on its electrical sword.”

— Tom Robbins

316. “Always compare yourself to the best. Even if you never measure up, it can’t help but make you better.”

— Tom Robbins

317. “At the typewriter you find out who you are.”

— Tom Robbins

318. “I journey to the east, where I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.”

— Tom Robbins

319. “One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They’ll do everything except rotate your tires.”

— Tom Robbins

320. “Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to all young mammals but are rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has, when it has advanced, not because it was sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, and rebellious, and immature.”

— Tom Robbins

321. “I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man’s primary problems aren’t political; they’re philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they’re condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It’s a cruel, repetitious bore.”

— Tom Robbins

322. “Love is very powerful, but it has limits and it’s a costly mistake to spread it too thin.”

— Tom Robbins

323. “The argument is irrelevant, for at the higher levels, science and art are the same. There is a point where high science transcends the technologic and enters the poetic, there is a point where high art transcends technique and enters the poetic.”

— Tom Robbins

324. “Once one pays some attention to something, then you begin to see evidence of it everywhere.”

— Tom Robbins

325. “Whether I’m unduly sensitive to this pain because I’m a princess – could the whole world be the pea under my mattress? – I don’t know, but because I’m a princess, I might be able to do something to help lessen humanity’s pain.”

— Tom Robbins

326. “Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.”

— Tom Robbins

327. “There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.”

— Tom Robbins

328. “You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait. Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you. To be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. – Franz Kafka.”

— Tom Robbins

329. “If you were Jesus with missing years to kill where would you go?”

— Tom Robbins

330. “Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats.”

— Tom Robbins

331. “Consider the silent repose of the sausage as compared to the aggressiveness of bacon.”

— Tom Robbins

332. “I am cheerful. I don’t know if I’m happy. There is a difference, you know.”

— Tom Robbins

333. “Cries for help are frequently inaudible.”

— Tom Robbins

334. “Leave it to a naive world-saver like you to view our love as a Sacred Cause when in actual fact all it was was some barking at the moon.”

— Tom Robbins

335. “When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on – series polygamy – until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.”

— Tom Robbins

336. “Nonetheless, the oyster, could it fancy, should fancy its excremental equipment a hot item, for what other among Creation’s crapping creatures can convert its bodily wastes into treasure?”

— Tom Robbins

337. “Plants and animals are even more comfortable with death. It is the natural end. But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man.”

— Tom Robbins

338. “Solace? That’s why God made fermented beverages and the blues.”

— Tom Robbins

339. “The gods have chosen to entertain me with chronic eyestrain headaches. Very poisonous episodes. So I don’t do a lot of reading anymore except on tape.”

— Tom Robbins

340. “I like travelers, but I don’t like tourists. The difference is that travelers don’t shop and they don’t play golf.”

— Tom Robbins

341. “In school you learn that it is the thumb that separates human beings from the lower primates. The thumb is an evolutionary triumph. Because of his thumbs, man can use tools; because he can use tools he can extend his senses, control his environment and increase in sophistication and power. The thumb is the cornerstone of civilization!”

— Tom Robbins

342. “He was as nervous as a praying mantis at an atheists’ picnic...”

— Tom Robbins

343. “Magic things are fond of deceptions.”

— Tom Robbins

344. “When we accept bad art because it’s good politics, we’re killing the swan to feed the chickens.”

— Tom Robbins

345. “Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist.”

— Tom Robbins

346. “As they say in my country, have a nice day.”

— Tom Robbins

347. “Beer’s nice for being glad and dizzy, and sometimes for the mystery and stuff, but the happy that comes out of a beer can is not like the real happy you got to make in your heart.”

— Tom Robbins

348. “He who jokes in the executioners face can be destroyed, but never defeated.”

— Tom Robbins

349. “My life is not merely a public phenomenon, it is a solitary adventure as well.”

— Tom Robbins

350. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more disoriented and alone. Or more thoroughly, serenely, at home. Every true romantic will know what I mean.”

— Tom Robbins