We all need more of the great, provocative musings from American author, the masterful Kurt Vonnegut. His off-kilter perspective on life breathes vitality into our whacky, modern world and those unintelligentable questions we are faced to grapple with. More importantly, his sensitive treatment of the human condition provides us with important guideposts for a healthy and happy life. Here are 15 wonderful quotes that should be committed to memory:
- I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’
- We must be careful about what we pretend to be.
- Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’
- That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
- It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life.
- 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 centre.
- When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
- I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.
- If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
- There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
- The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not.
- If you can do no good, at least do no harm.
- Here we are, trapped, in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
- You learn about life by the accidents you have, over and over again…
- We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
