Spider Robinson Quotes

Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.

Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.

Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.

When writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence...in love, never settle...value yourself first and this will help you to value others...life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest...everyone in the world is different, and that's ok.

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.

You know what gives me the courage to keep on living? The courage to love myself a little? It's having a whole bunch of friends who really give a goddamn. When you share pain, there's less of it, and when you share joy, there's more of it.

Librarians are the secret masters of the world. They control information. Don't ever piss one off.

We are all time travelers moving at the speed of exactly 60 minutes per hour.

This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.

Man, you're no smarter than me. You're just a fancier kind of stupid.

Anger is always - always - fear in disguise.

...I know good design when I fail to trip over it.

You become uneasy with people in direct proportion to how many lies you have to keep track of in their presence.

there's nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can't be endured - if you have someone to share it with.

Information can't be put in any container that isn't leaky.

Mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening ... and those who find it thrilling. The rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history.

In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system!

Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I'd rather be. So do my friends.

A beginning is the end of something, always.

Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.

Time didn't pass; it tailgated.

Sexual intercourse vests no property rights.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand?

To be human : to strive in the face of the certainty of failure.

It took me better than a quarter century to learn, the hard way, that hard work at something you want to be doing is the most fun that you can have out of bed . . . to learn that the smart man finds ways to make everything he does be work; to learn that "leisure" time is truly pleasurable (indeed tolerable) only to the extent that is its subconscious grazing for information with which to infuse newer, better work.