Robert Fulghum Quotes

If you run into trouble doing what's expected, people sympathize with you, while if you try something else and flop everyone says, You see?

At some point, you realize that people might be laughing at your jokes because they're afraid not to laugh.

I think girls are especially worried about being judged, and when you're in high school, everything seems like a bigger deal than it is. As soon as you're out, it feels like forever ago-zip-a-dee-doo-dah! So do what you want, and if people are going to judge you for it, who cares? You might not fit in, but that's okay.

Accept that all of us can be hurt, that all of us can and surely will at times fail. Other vulnerabilities, like being embarrassed or risking love, can be terrifying, too. I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.

If I lose the ball, I lose it trying to do the right thing. That's the way it is.

I go out there and make a fool of myself. It's inevitable.

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.

Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

Growing up, I was a target. Speaking the right way, standing the right way, holding your wrist the right way. Every day was a test, and there were a thousand ways to fail, a thousand ways to betray yourself, to not live up to someone else's standards of what was accepted, of what was normal.

Remember that you cannot please everybody because you are likely to end up pleasing nobody.

If you are not willing to be a lone wolf, keep your truth to yourself. If you want acceptance and your truths to be spoken, it is a slippery slope.

I worry that's what people are going to think about me if they kind of go backwards. But if that didn't happen to you, I'll feel better.

If you can neither accept it or change it, try to laugh at it.

I believe that there is a great fear in our generation of being labeled as priggish.

I wake up in the morning and sometimes I just want to wear a T-shirt and blue jeans and now I have to force myself to do that, because I can't care what people think, you know?

Be yourself. If you try to be someone else, it won't work. Whatever you do, you are not going to make everyone happy.

I think men spend so much time passing for being men.

Seems like a lot of my generation as a whole is more concerned with being the cool kid; sarcastic, smug, or just all together impenetrable. So anyway, it's not always comfortable to be like, the dorky, happy girl at the party... but that's me.

I'm afraid to laugh out loud, because there's so much information.

Even the toughest guys are afraid to be anything outside of the toughest guys.

I wasn't a great improviser when I started there; I'm not really up on current events. I would always just mug, just try to get my laughs from making faces. So I decided to do a character who should never have become a comic - somebody you would see at the Comedy Store and go, "This person is never going to make it."

If you are worried about what others might think and about how your position in the group might be jeopardized, then you will never really create anything.

If you can laugh at your mistakes, it's a good thing.

What does it mean that social structures among young people are so often predicated upon trying really, really hard to appear to not-be-trying?

I don't think men try to make women be like them, but I think women try to make men be like them, a lot.