Marty Rubin Quotes

Biography

Type: Gay activist, author and journalist

Born: 1930

Died: 1994

Rubin, a typesetter by trade, came to South Florida in the mid-1970s from California, where he had been in the gay rights movement. His first activism in South Florida was as a political organizer for the 1977 gay rights referendum in Dade County, which was defeated. Mr. Rubin also began trying to get Broward gays and lesbians politically involved. He was the founding chairman of the Broward County Gay Pride Committee in 1980 and of the Dolphin Democratic Club in 1984.

Marty Rubin Quotes

Children, like God, see only our actions.. Marty Rubin
Children, like God, see only our actions.

Dreams must be ground into bread, and the bread eaten.. Marty Rubin
Dreams must be ground into bread, and the bread eaten.

The desire to change things must begin with accepting things as they are.. Marty Rubin
The desire to change things must begin with accepting things as they are.

Take a wrong turn. Get lost in something you love.. Marty Rubin
Take a wrong turn. Get lost in something you love.

Love is a wild child, always at odds with society.. Marty Rubin
Love is a wild child, always at odds with society.

If words are the truth, what is living for?. Marty Rubin
If words are the truth, what is living for?

Writing is talking to yourself-with the hope of being overheard.. Marty Rubin
Writing is talking to yourself-with the hope of being overheard.

Writing is like life: it goes on.. Marty Rubin
Writing is like life: it goes on.

More sailors have drowned in words than in the sea.. Marty Rubin
More sailors have drowned in words than in the sea.

Be a poet in action as well as in words.. Marty Rubin
Be a poet in action as well as in words.

We don't know history. We only know what has been written about it.. Marty Rubin
We don't know history. We only know what has been written about it.

Writing is discovering what you don't know.. Marty Rubin
Writing is discovering what you don't know.

If I could find the right words, I'd say what the blue sky says.. Marty Rubin
If I could find the right words, I'd say what the blue sky says.

The seductive power of sex and money is nothing compared to that of words.. Marty Rubin
The seductive power of sex and money is nothing compared to that of words.

It makes no difference what Christ or Buddha said.. Marty Rubin
It makes no difference what Christ or Buddha said.

What happens is always worth more than words.. Marty Rubin
What happens is always worth more than words.

Once you master starting and stopping, the rest is easy.. Marty Rubin
Once you master starting and stopping, the rest is easy.

One writes primarily to free oneself from oneself.. Marty Rubin
One writes primarily to free oneself from oneself.

Words never change. What changes is how one interprets them.. Marty Rubin
Words never change. What changes is how one interprets them.

Words, like people, hate to be the slaves of ideas. Marty Rubin
Words, like people, hate to be the slaves of ideas

Two kinds of writers. One treats the world as if it were fiction; the other treats fiction as if it were the world.

Never do anything for money you wouldn't do for free.

A writer's courage: to leave a blank page blank.

Words can't save you, but they can give you courage.

It's the words we whisper to ourselves that make us who we are.

Words make known. But we live in the unknown.

What one does is always worth more than words.

Words alone mean nothing, because they can do nothing.

Write as if Time will erase every word.

If you have the experience, why do you need the words?

Words are the great temptation.

Every writer knows that words are the enemy.

The right words to express oneself can never be found in any dictionary.

Confusion is a web of words.

Out of dumbness, out of confusion, arise the true words.

How long does one have to live before one can no longer be fooled by words?

Words have to make sense; facts don't. That life makes no sense is the most beautiful fact of all.

The world is so big and words are so small!

How old must you be before words can no longer fool you?

Words could never satisfy me, but life satisfies me.

There is more to writing than playing with words.

We work best when we're unaware of working

What you do to kill time is your real work.

One is never wounded by the love one gives, only by the love one expects.

The truth is what you live through while you're looking for the truth.

Never confuse a hunger for knowledge with a thirst for truth.

An aphorism needn't be true, but it should sound true.

Where the truth is censored, the truth grows fangs.

The slope contains many wonders not found at the summit.

Philosophers console themselves with explanations.

Nothing is more futile than looking for meaning in things that have none.

The greatest wisdom is indistinguishable from the greatest folly.

I don't want to be the one who says life is beautiful. I want to be the one who feels it.

Happiness never made anyone rich or famous. That must be why ambitious people avoid it.

If you think happiness is a rare bird you won't see much of it.

Nothing succeeds like indifference to success.

Enjoy the rainbow while it lasts and don't chase it when it's gone.

Happiness: the feeling of being alive.

Happiness is what matters, feeling alive-not art or knowledge or money.

The gold you have to dig for is not the real gold.

Stop comparing yourself to others and you'll be happy.

I don't believe in the search. I believe in happiness now.

We're all drowning, but don't say it out loud.

Everything but a life can be replaced.

When death speaks to me, it speaks only of the beauty of life.

One death apiece is plenty.

It is time at last for all the gods to be silent.

When all else fails, stare straight into the sun.

The first kiss and the first glass of wine are the best.

Poetry is nothing if it exists only in books. One has to find it in one's own life.

Emotion is the poetry of life.

Bring a song with you into the darkness.

The world will not be saved by poets or poetry.

All poets are religious poets.

Poets should be crazy-but only in their poems.

Cities are built out of poet's dreams.

Believing in yourself is the best poetry.

It takes a long time to learn how to do something simple.

Information is what you put in empty heads to keep them empty.

Nothing is so deceiving as knowledge.

We know birth and we know death; the mystery is everything in-between.

We don't know why anything happens or why anything is.

The hard thing isn't getting what you want, it's knowing what you want.

Experience is true, but not the lessons it teaches.

Happy people have always inspired me.

Lying for lying's sake is the inspiration behind all great art

Inspiration is simply doing whatever it is you want to do.

The brightest stars don't necessarily give the most light.

The pieces of a puzzle aren't together or apart.

The scientists must be crazy themselves if they think they can explain this crazy world.

The mystic sees God in everything; the scientist, atoms; the poet, poetry.

A scale can tell what a body weighs, but not its value.

Art and science should serve humanity and not the other way around.

Scientific reality is as different from lived reality as a slide rule is from a platypus.

Myth is ancient science; science is modern myth.

Scientists know more and more and so science advances. Artists know less and less and so art advances.

The deep roots never doubt spring will come.

Books can't hurt you, if you don't read them.

Books end. Stories never do.

A champion is someone who has overcome a lot of fear.

Parrots mimic their owners. Their owners consider that a sign of intelligence.

Time does not pass, it continues

Time can't be found, only lost.

Enjoy today, the time you have now, for time cannot be found only lost.

Enjoy your life, the time you have now, because time cannot be found only lost.

It is always Time that has the last word.

Time and the wind never leave anything alone.

Time spent thinking about life is better spent enjoying it.

The mouse that fears the trap has already been trapped.

Fear is to the mind what sickness is to the body.

Love, and love alone, drives out fear.

If you're scared to be alone, you are alone.

I owe my last breath to death but not one breath more.

If you're afraid to be alone, you are alone.

Cowardice is the fear of contradiction.

After one has read everything and thought everything, one still have everything to learn.

What would beauty be if the whole world were blind?

You can spit on a rose, but it's still a rose.

Order is what exists before you start arranging things.

The beauty of this day doesn't depend on its lasting forever.

What makes a life-any life-beautiful is the simple fact of living it.

We are alive and in the world and that is beautiful and everything.

Beauty is something that changes your life, not something you understand.

Things are beautiful when they're allowed to be free.

Beauty is the desire for beauty.

Beautiful untrue things are even more beautiful when they're true.

Make your life beautiful; you're the only one who can.

A beautiful sentence and a beautiful sunset derive from the same source.

No one plants rosebushes for the thorns.

The familiar is by far the most beautiful.

Lovers jump into bed without thinking. It's the only way it can be done.

Sex is natural, but enjoying it's an art.

Drug-pushers, God-pushers, sex-pushers, art-pushers-all kinds of pushers.

Love is the body's warmth; sex, its heat.

We need places to scream and run wild as well as places to be quiet.

The story of the tree is written on every leaf.

Under a red desert sky all thought seems superfluous.

Since nature abhors a vacuum, the void must be in you.

The sea answers only to the sea.

Many a petal has yet to fall before the last one falls.

The tiniest mite has an inner life of which we can know nothing.

I'd rather be encouraged by an ant to live than taught to doubt by fifty skeptics.

Of all the elements in the periodic table, not a single one is indestructible.

I still find the moon more amazing than the fact men have walked on it.

I'm on the side of whatever keeps the flowers growing.

To one who loves birds, morning always wakes up singing.

An avalanche doesn't look back at the damage it causes.

The only acceptable alternative to silence is to speak from the heart

Real dishes break. That's how you know they're real.

Build your castle of dreams but don't live in it.

The landscape looks different from every blade of grass.

Lies have always been easier to invent than reality.

When a head and a wall collide, it's never the wall that breaks.

You can't eliminate the dust, only move it somewhere else.

Dream as much as you like, but the world is not a dream.

Magic is not what magicians can do, but what they can't do.

A cloud is more real than all my thoughts.

You don't have to have a dream for it to come true.

There is no deeper reality. The water at the bottom is the same as the water at the top.

When people are facing real hardships in their lives, they have no time to invent imaginary ones.

What do I think? I think it makes no difference what I think.

The world is real; philosophy is the illusion.

Sometimes out of sheer perversity reality conforms to my wishes.

Every language has its own word for the sun, but the sun us always the same.

A consistent outlook is inconsistent with reality.

A microbe is more deadly than a minotaur

To be ignorant as God is ignorant, knowing only what is real.

In my mind I lead a phantom's life. My neighbor makes me real.

Some things are too strange to believe, but nothing is too strange to have happened.

The fire alarm is not the fire.

Language is a ladder that always falls short of reality.

A new theory doesn't change the way things actually happen.

When a war breaks out, everyone is on the wrong side.

In a war between evils, only evil wins.

Every war casts humanity back into the primordial slime.

Every human life has infinite value and to destroy even one is a crime against all humanity.

Every wars casts humanity back into the primordial slime.

The struggle against injustice is just another kind of injustice.

If wars still exist, it's because we don't love peace enough.

Wars have always been easier to fight than explain.

There is only one side to be on-the side of life

Art is a space in which freedom tests its wings.

The only valid rule for a work of art is that it be true to itself.

Art is a picture of the spirit.

The scientist seeks laws; the historian, causes; the artist, freedom.

Artists, by their free expressions, encourage others to be free. This is the quality that makes works of art enduring.

Art is the truth of the imagination.

An artist's work never leads anywhere except to the unknown.

Once you've mastered starting and stopping, the rest is easy.

Culture is local; art, universal.

Every successful work of art is a collaboration between the known and the unknown.

What an artist finds, he finds without looking for it.

For the true artist, there is no trivial thing.

The craving for recognition is every artist's Achilles heel.

The knowledge an artist possesses is an advanced form of daydreaming.

Mediocrity-the artist's hell.

You don't learn art from life, or life from art.

Art should be sublime and a little silly.

When an artist finds, he finds without looking for it.

The arts save us from a dreary skepticism.

Everything an artist smells, hears, tastes, touches becomes part of his art.

Art is like that. You set out to make one thing and make another.

The role of the artist today is to defend feeling against the machine.

The task of the artist today is to defend feeling against the machine.

An artist's work is one long conversation with life.

Art appears when the artist disappears.

It's not an artist's job to change people or save the world.

It is not knowledge that makes an artist

Obsession is more valuable to an artist than knowledge.

Only a free hand can draw a free line.

Art's aim is life, a deeper connection with life.

Art should be a great hallelujah to life.

A puzzle with a solution is a game. A puzzle without a solution is a work of art.

To extract major truths from minor details is an artist's job.

Art is an extension of friendship, a reaching out to the world.

Make your life beautiful, you're the only one who can.

The tragedy of every religion is that it needs a church to survive.

The problem is not religion but the void that creates religions.

History is conjecture raised to the level of an art.

Our way of thinking causes us more pain than all our misfortunes.

A corpse boasted of being pain and trouble free. No one envied his lot.

Pain never apologizes.

Trust opens the door that pain had sealed shut.

There is peace in knowing that whatever one thinks it is not the truth.

Peace is the first condition of joy.

Boredom is peace misunderstood.

Only kind people seem really human.

Humanity will never truly evolve until personal responsibility becomes the norm.

Man is the only creature for whom being alive isn't enough.

Why do people value most the things they haven't got?

If the cockroaches survive and we don't, what does that say about human intelligence?

Poetry, like blood, runs through our veins.

No ideology or psychological theory can possibly do justice to the full range of human experience.

Sometimes I feel certain that the hyenas are laughing at us.

Wherever freedom is being discussed, we're all part of the conversation.

Trying to be more than human one becomes less.

Technology is not the problem, nor is religion the problem. We are the problem.

Nothing else is needed to be a complete human being than to have been born a human being

Freedom begins with respect for the freedom of others.

Technology is not the problem. We are the problem.

Humanity's favorite pasttime: pretending to know what it doesn't know.

You can't dissect a dream without killing it.

Blessed are the dreamers, for they keep the rest of us awake.

When you're living, just living, dreams come true you never knew you had.

In dreams and stories we rearrange our lives.

The rain that falls wherever it pleases. I want to be that rain.

Freedom began on the day the first sheep wandered away from the herd.

The wild ivy grows wherever it pleases.

To know your soul is your own, that's what counts.

Drink freely the wine life offers you and don't worry how much you spill.

When a thing becomes indispensable it's time to give it up.

Never say yes to anything you can't say no to.

I never reach those far-off places. New trails tempt me at every turn.

Wander, and leave a trail of freedom wherever you go.

Relax and be free. You don't have to prove anything.

They'll never build a fence high enough or a wall thick enough to keep freedom out.

The freedom I treasure most is the freedom to get up and leave.

More choices doesn't necessarily mean more freedom.

Beware of what you teach your children in the womb.

It's not true that skeptics consider nothing sacred. They consider freedom sacred.

The true poetic urge is the desire for absolute freedom.

We need sentiment and skepticism. Sentiment to be happy; skepticism to be free.

Hypocrisy is the homage freedom pays to social convention.

Freedom's chains are the hardest to break.

We are born free, but are taught to obey orders.

It isn't true that skeptics consider nothing sacred. They consider freedom sacred.

We always need new ideas to free us from the old ones.

We are born free, but we're taught to obey orders.

Some canaries love their cages, they even call them home.

Freedom means nothing unless it means the freedom to be different

Freedom, too, can be a trap if you pursue it too doggedly.

Movement is the freedom of the body; stillness, of the mind.

Freedom is what we do; fate is what happens to us.

Morality is the clipping of a bird's wings.

A long leash is not freedom.

One is free, and at the mercy of everything.

There is music you never hear unless you play it yourself.

Play your music so the earth can dance.

Flowers are the music of the earth.

Music is the most abstract of the arts; dance, the most concrete.

What good is a song that doesn't break your heart?

We are always changing, always different, and yet strangely and recognizably always the same.

How different every hour is from the one before!

We are changed by the things we try to change.

Never doubt that a single moment can change everything.

Change is always trivial compared to what doesn't change.

Truth is a bubble and hard to hold on to.

It's not easy to change things. Things fight back.

I have found much in people to love but nothing to envy.

Love people, not places. Places don't miss you when you're gone.

In the same way mannequins resemble people, images resemble life.

You can't know people, only their names.

The best thing in life is having someone to share it with.

When your share your story with someone, it becomes their story too.

The child's naive dream of life is the only one worth having.

Children are the poem made flesh.

All children are born rebels and explorers until they're taught to sit still and obey.

Young children and old ladies have inspired me more than poets and philosophers.

Children remind us that we're all children.

I have no heroes except flowers and children.

If you can abuse your power you have too much.

It's no use organizing the mice if the cat doesn't agree.

There is no fact which is not at least part fiction.

All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.

Fiction isn't truer than life: it just makes a better story.

What we say about ourselves is always a form of fiction.

A good story will always outlive the truth.

A story has to break your heart or it's not worth telling.

There is no fact that is not at least part fiction.

Ideas are like money: people kill for ideas.

To be saved is to believe in one's own courage.

Truthfulness requires humility as well as courage.

Some leaves hang on longer but eventually they all fall.

Fighting doesn't hurt until you stop.

Seeing is always an act of courage.

The plant that's been uprooted has only courage to hold it up.

Literature, the act of writing, affirms life, however dark the story it tells.

A person can drop dead even while singing. But that's no reason to stop singing.

The singing I like best is when I sing.

There is a madness that is joy, and a madness that is just madness.

The main thing is to be full of life. Everything else is secondary.

Blessed is the nightbird that sings for joy and not to be heard.

Ambition is the death of joy.

Better Old King Cole and his merry soul than a hundred Jeremiahs.

A pessimist is someone who has forgotten the joy of beginning.

Being alive is having what I want, that is my joy, my happiness.

You can't dissect a joy without killing it.

Don't let the worries of this foolish world destroy your joy in living.

Joy is wisdom I trust.

Summer, like a kiss, trembles when it first arrives.

Men are always ready to fight; it's tenderness that scares them.

Creativity should include everything that makes one feel alive.

Happiness isn't something one finds, it's something one creates.

Listen when the sirens sing. How else will you learn?

Time is the school we learn in.

What I learned from the flowers: to live effortlessly.

Error is the school we learn in.

One learns by doing, not by learning to do.

It's not the wound that teaches, but the healing.

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