Explore Quotes by Kurt Vonnegut

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

See the cat? See the cradle?

And 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.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber.

The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones.

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Life is no way to treat an animal.

I wanted all things to seem to make some sense, So we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense. And I made up lies, so they all fit nice, and I made this sad world a paradise

I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.

You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn't really like life at all.

All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.

A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.