Bob Dylan quotes:

You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent; God, the all-great; God, the Almighty; God, the most powerful; God, the giver of life; God, the creator of death. I mean, we're hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.

I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work.

Democracy don't rule the world, You'd better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that's better left unsaid.

Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people: there's saved people and there's lost people.

You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

I don't think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

In ceremonies of the horsemen, even the pawn must hold a grudge.

I'm just glad to be feeling better. I really thought I'd be seeing Elvis soon.

Colleges are like old-age homes, except for the fact that more people die in colleges.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

The land created me. I'm wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I'm more at home in the vacant lots.

Folk music is a bunch of fat people.

People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

There is nothing so stable as change.

Your heart is like the ocean, mysterious and dark.

Let me ask you one questionIs your money that goodWill it buy you forgivenessDo you think that it couldI think you will findWhen your death takes its tollAll the money you madeWill never buy back your soul

What good are fans? You can't eat applause for breakfast. You can't sleep with it.

You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

Nothing can affect my voice, it's so bad.

I realize I don't do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

Wagon Train was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door--a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness.

She's a hypnotist collector; you are a walking antique..."

Abe said, where do you want this killing done? God said, out on highway 61.

God said: "Abraham, kill me a son. Abe said: "Man, you must be putting me on." God said: "No." Abe said: "What" God said: "You can do what you want Abe but the next time you see me coming you'd better run". Abe said: "Where you want this killing done?" God said: "Out on Highway 61.

I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me.

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most.

Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.

You'll never be greater than yourself.

Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through.

I'm more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

You swore you'd never compromise With the mystery tramp, but now you realise He's not selling any alibis As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes And say, do you want to make a deal How does it feel

But I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned.

They like to take all this money from sin, build big universities to study in, sing Amazing Grace all the way to the Swiss banks.

with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls ...

May you grow up to be righteous, may you grow up to be true. May you always know the truth and see the lights surrounding you. May you always be courageous, stand upright and be strong. May you stay forever young.

May you always be courageous, stand upright and be strong, may you stay forever young.

What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

There's beauty in the silver singing river There's beauty in the sunrise in the sky But none of these and nothing else can match the beauty That I remember in my true love's eyes

As he weeps to wicked birds of prey, who pick up on his bread crumb sins, and there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden.

I have tried my hand at bribery, blackmail, and deceit. And I've served time for everything, cept beggin on the street.

If I wasn't Bob Dylan, I'd probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.

Jesus tapped me on the shoulder and said, Bob, why are you resisting me? I said, I'm not resisting you! He said, You gonna follow me? I said, I've never thought about that before! He said, When you're not following me, you're resisting me.

Somebody had to be Bob Dylan. I guess I was best equipped to do the job.

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks.

I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to The Smithsonian. Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn't make his records if you had a hundred tracks today.

I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. Horrible titles any way you want to look at it. All code words for Outlaw.

Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb.

Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot.

Feeling funny in my mind, Lord I believe I'm fixing to die Well, I don't mind dying But I hate to leave my children crying Well, I look over yonder to that burying ground Look over yonder to that burying ground Sure seems lonesome, Lord, when the sun goes down

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him . . . I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck . . . Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune The Titanic sails at dawn And everybody's shouting "Which Side Are You On?" And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot Fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them And fishermen hold flowers.

The woman I love she got a prize fighter nose, cauliflower ears and a run in her hose.

The cavalries charged and the Indians died, oh the country was young with God on its side.

In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's.

You use to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat, who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.

Sailin' 'round the world in a dirty gondola Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.

A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.

They can't hurt me. Sure, they can crush you and kill you. They can lay you out on 42nd and Broadway and put hoses on you and flush you in the sewers and put you on the subway and carry you out to Coney island and bury you on the Ferris wheel. But I refuse to sit here and worry about dying.

I love Country Music but what happened to it?

A cat's meow and cow's moo, I can recite them all.

There are those who worship loneliness, I'm not one of them In this age of fiberglass I'm searching for a gem The crystal ball up on the wall hasn't shown me nothing yet I've paid the price of solitude, but at last I'm out of debt

A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.

Anger and jealousy's all that he sells us, he's content when you're under his thumb. Madmen oppose him, but your kindness throws him, to survive it you play deaf and dumb.

There's a whole lot of people in trouble tonight From the disease of conceit Whole lot of people seeing double tonight From the disease of conceit Give ya delusions of grandeur And a evil eye Give you the idea that You're too good to die Then they bury you from your head to your feet From the disease of conceit

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people, they're drinking, thinking that they got it made. Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things, but you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it, babe.

Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.

Got no religion. Tried a bunch of different religions. The churches are divided. Can't make up their minds and neither can I.

Up north, you could find these radio stations with no name on the dials that played pre-rock 'n' roll things - country blues. We would hear Slim Harpo or Lightnin' Slim and gospel groups, the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. I was so far north, I didn't even know where Alabama was.

Don't know which one is worse, doing your own thing or just being cool.

The man in the coon skin cap in the pig pen wants eleven dollar bills, you've only got ten.

If you're looking to get silly, you better go back to from where you came. because the cops don't need you and man they expect the same.

You've got to lose your passion for dumbness.

Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.

Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.

I fought with my twin, the enemy within.

There's a lot of false prophets around and that's the trouble. People say they think they know what's right and other people get people to follow them because they have a certain type of charisma, and there's always people willing to take over. People want a leader. And there will be more and more of them.

The future for me is already a thing of the past - You were my first love and you will be my last

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

You're gonna have to serve somebody.

May you stay Forever Young

May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung. May you stay forever young.

May God bless and keep you always, May your wishes all come true, May you always do for others And let others do for you. May you build a ladder to the stars And climb on every rung, May you stay forever young,

So, I don't know. I think so. It's all in the heart, whatever keeps you that way. Keeps you forever young. Forever young doesn't necessarily mean that you don't grow old, but you just have some contact with what put you where you are. You know, keep some type of contact. Anyway...

May you have a strong foundation when the winds of change shift...and may you be forever young.

You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore.

Your mind is a your temple, keep it beautiful and free. Don't let an egg get laid in it by something you can't see.

Everything from toy guns that spark To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark It's easy to see without looking too far That not much is really sacred.

God bless you all with peace, tranquility and good will.

In the fury of the moment/ I can see the Master's hand In every leaf that trembles, in/ every grain of sand.

I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan, like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It's hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger.

You can't be happy by doing something groovy.

If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.

Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder

Frank [Sinatra] sang to you, not at you, like so many pop singers today. Even singers of standards. I never wanted to be a singer that sings at somebody. I've always wanted to sing to somebody. I would have gotten that subliminally from Frank many years ago. Hank Williams did that, too. He sang to you.

I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams.

I hate myself for loving you and the weakness that it showed. You were just a painted face on a trip down to suicide road.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

How many times have you heard someone say If I had his money I'd do things my way Hmm, but little they know Hmm, it's so hard to find One rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.

All the tired horses in the sun How'm I supposed to get any ridin' done? Hmm.

I hurt easy, I just don't show it. You can hurt someone and not even know it.

I believe in you, even though I be outnumbered.

I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin'. When she said, hey man, you crazy or somethin'?

When the jelly faced women all sneeze, hear the one with the mustache say I can't find my knees.

Get jailed, jump bail, join the Army if you fail.

You want to know about creativity? Just go out and buy that book Imagine by Jonah Lehrer. It's only $29.00 in hardcover.