Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

“Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside.”

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.”

“It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.”

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

“You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.”

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

“And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.”

“Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.”

“We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.”

“For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. "Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.”