If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Adversity, Action, Busy, Industry
One of the very few reasons I had any respect for my mother when I was thirteen was because she would reach into the sink with her bare hands – bare hands – and pick up that lethal gunk and drop it into the garbage. To top that, I saw her reach into the wet garbage bag and fish around in there looking for a lost teaspoon. Bare hands – a kind of mad courage.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Mothers
Share everything. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Put things back where you found them.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Sharing
Public lives are lived out on the job and in the marketplace, where certain rules, conventions, laws, and social customs keep most of us in line. Private lives are lived out in the presence of family, friends, and neighbors who must be considered and respected even though the rules and proscriptions are looser than what’s allowed in public. But in our secret lives, inside our own heads, almost anything goes.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Secrets
Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away!
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Peace
Wherever and however any one of us may be conceived, it is the same. We come into being in the arms of God.
—Robert Fulghum
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air – explode softly – and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth – boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either – not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Peace, Inner-child
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge—that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts—That hope always triumphs over experience—That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Imagination, Life and Living, Grief, Belief, History, Dreams
Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Listening, Example, Worry
I’ve always thought anyone can make money. Making a life worth living, that’s the real test.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Money
It’s not that I’m not grateful for all this attention. It’s just that fame and fortune ought to add up to more than fame and fortune.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Success is not everything
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Balance
The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Perception, Attitude
Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is IT goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.
Medieval theologians even described God, in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines – by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Religion
To be human is to keep rattling the bars of the cage of existence hollering, What’s it for?
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Humanity
The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: World
Think what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Inner-child
Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
—Robert Fulghum
Topics: Balance, Living, Wonder
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Thomas Starr King American Unitarian Minister
- Hosea Ballou American Theologian
- William Laurence Sullivan American Unitarian Clergyman
- James Freeman Clarke American Unitarian Clergyman
- Edward Everett Hale American Unitarian Clergyman
- Edwin Hubbell Chapin American Preacher, Poet
- Thomas Wentworth Higginson American Reformer, Editor
- Washington Irving American Author
- Ernest Hemingway American Author
- Orson Scott Card American Author
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