110+ Bob Dylan Quotes On War, Age And Songwriting

Bob Dylan was an American singer-songwriter, author, and visual artist who has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for more than five decades. His career began in the early 1960s with songs that chronicled social issues and his distinctive vocal style and songwriting. He has since released over fifty albums, won eleven Grammy Awards, and been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Bob Dylan on life, love, war.

Top 10 Bob Dylan Quotes

1. A person is a success if they get up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
2. Sometimes you just have to bite your upper lip and put sunglasses on.
3. People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.
4. 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.
5. Your heart is like the ocean, mysterious and dark.
6. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
7. Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.
8. You need something to open up a new door, to show you something you seen before but overlooked a hundred times or more
9. Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.
10. I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

Bob Dylan Image Quotes

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. — Bob Dylan

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

How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see? — Bob Dylan

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours. — Bob Dylan

How many roads must a man walk down.. Before you can call him a Man. — Bob Dylan

People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Short Quotes

• I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.
• How many roads must a man walk down.. Before you can call him a Man.
• Lord knows I've paid my dues getting through, tangled up in blue.
• I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.
• May you always be courageous, stand upright and be strong, may you stay forever young.
• May you have a strong foundation when the winds of change shift...and may you be forever young.
• Sometimes the silence can be like thunder.
• When you cease to exist, then who will you blame?
• A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding.
• Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected expected?

Bob Dylan Quotes About Life

They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king. — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

The corporations have taken over. Even in the recording studio. Actually, the corporate companies have taken over American life most everywhere. Go coast to coast and you will see people wearing the same clothes, thinking the same thoughts, eating the same food. Everything is processed. — Bob Dylan

You can't be wise and in love at the same time. — Bob Dylan

He who is not busy being born is busy dying. — Bob Dylan

The purpose of art is to stop time. — Bob Dylan

A lot of people say there is no happiness in this life and certainly there's no permanent happiness. But self-sufficiency creates happiness. — Bob Dylan

It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be. — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

I really don't like to hurt myself. I have a good understanding with all the women who have been in my life, whether I see them occasionally or not. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About Love

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 — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

All right, I'll take a chance. I will fall in love with you. If i'm a fool you can have the night, you can have the morning too. Can you cook and sew. make flowers grow. Do you understand my pain? Are you willing to risk it all or is your love in vain? — Bob Dylan

Suddenly I found you and the spirit in me sings, Don't have to look no further, You're the soul of many things. — Bob Dylan

I once loved a girl, her skin it was bronze With the innocence of a lamb, she was gentle like a fawn I courted her proudly but now she is gone Gone as the season she's taken — Bob Dylan

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged. — Bob Dylan

My love is like some raven at my window with a broken wing. — Bob Dylan

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

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

Done so many evil things in the name of love, it's a crying shame. I never did see no fire that could put out a flame. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About War

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. — Bob Dylan

Hold it, Doc, a world war passed through my brain. He said, Nurse, get your pad, this boy's insane. — Bob Dylan

...how many times must the cannon balls fly Before they're forever banned? — Bob Dylan

Trying to create a next world war, he found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor, he said I never engaged in this kind of thing before, but yes I think it can be very easily done. — Bob Dylan

If God is on our side, he'll stop the next war. — Bob Dylan

There's been rumors of war and wars that have been The meaning of life has been lost in the wind And some people thinkin' that the end is close by 'Stead of learnin' to live they are learnin' to die — Bob Dylan

Uncle fought in Vietnam and then he fought a war all by himself. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About Age

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 — Bob Dylan

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

Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the 80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that's going on right now in a big way. — Bob Dylan

In this age of fiberglass, I'm searching for a gem. — Bob Dylan

I see the turning of the page, curtain rising on a new age, see the groom still waiting at the altar. — Bob Dylan

I used to play hockey when I was growing up. Everyone sort of learns how to skate and play hockey at an early age. — Bob Dylan

Your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one If you can't lend your hand, For the times they are a-changin'. — Bob Dylan

We never thought we could ever get old. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About Songwriting

You don't write a song to sit there on a page. You write it to sing it. — Bob Dylan

That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after. — Bob Dylan

If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that. — Bob Dylan

If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years. — Bob Dylan

After becoming famous once again - a 1976 song, "Hurricane," even marked a return to protest songwriting - [Bob] Dylan got addicted to drugs, found Jesus, left Jesus, and put out a lot of swill. — Bob Dylan

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something - something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. — Bob Dylan

The confessional singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s was in full swing, and Bob Dylan's emotional album [ Blood on the Tracks] resonated with the times. There would be other hits, but never the same alchemy of emotion and time. — Bob Dylan

I was never a topical songwriter. — Bob Dylan

Once I went into songwriting, I figured I had to - I couldn't be a hellfire rock 'n' roller. But I could write hellfire lyrics. — Bob Dylan

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

Bob Dylan Quotes About Music

Folk music is a bunch of fat people. — Bob Dylan

The harmonica is the world's best-selling musical instrument. You're welcome. — Bob Dylan

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

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway. — Bob Dylan

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now. — Bob Dylan

My songs are personal music, they're not communal. I wouldn't want people singing along with me. It would sound funny. I'm not playing campfire meetings. I don't remember anyone singing along with Elvis, Carl Perkins or Little Richard. — Bob Dylan

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas. — Bob Dylan

..When I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody ... hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

If you ever tell anyone about Jonah's sexual dysfunction, I'll never play music again. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About Creativity

Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn't work. — Bob Dylan

Creativity has a lot to do with the main idea. Inspiration is what comes when you are dealing with the idea. But inspiration won't invite what's not there to begin with. — Bob Dylan

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

I just don't hear anyone else making the music I'm making in my head, so I'll have to do it myself. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About Peace

Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground. — Bob Dylan

If I had rubies, riches, and crowns, I'd buy the whole world and change things around. — Bob Dylan

Peace is the time it takes to reload your rifle. — Bob Dylan

The inmates and prisoners, I found they were my kind, and it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind. — Bob Dylan

You got men who can't hold peace and women who can't control their tongues. The rich seduce the poor, and the old seduce the young. — Bob Dylan

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

To preach of peace and brotherhood, oh what might be the cost? A man he did it long ago, and they hung him on a cross. — Bob Dylan

Good intentions can be evil, both hands are full of grease. You know, sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace. — Bob Dylan

Oh, the inmates and the prisoners I found they were my kind And it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind But the jails they were too crowded Institutions overflowed So they turned me loose to walk upon Life's hurried tangled road — Bob Dylan

Remember when you're out there trying to heal the sick, that you must always first forgive them. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About Education

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. — Bob Dylan

My guard stood hard when abstract threats, too noble to neglect, deceived me into thinking, I had something to protect. — Bob Dylan

Nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street. — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

People tell me it's a sin, to know and feel too much within. — Bob Dylan

As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree, and the locusts sang off in the distance. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About People

You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist. — Bob Dylan

People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations. — Bob Dylan

Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most. — Bob Dylan

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

Half of the people can be part right all of the time, Some of the people can be all right part of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that. 'I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,' I said that. — Bob Dylan

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

I've never been able to understand the seriousness of it all, the seriousness of pride. People talk, act, live as if they're never going to die. And what do they leave behind? Nothing. Nothing but a mask. — Bob Dylan

There used to be a time when the idea of heroes was important. People grew up sharing those myths and legends and ideals. Now they grow up sharing McDonalds and Disneyland. — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

I dug it, New York City, all-the streets and the snows and the starving and the five-flight walkups and sleeping in rooms with ten people. I dug the trains and the shadows, the way I dug ore mines and coal mines. I just jumped right to the bottom of New York. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About World

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. — Bob Dylan

Democracy don't rule the world, you better get that in your head; this world is ruled by violence, but I guess that's better left unsaid. — Bob Dylan

Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola! — Bob Dylan

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

Despite everybody who has been born and has died, the world has just gone on. I mean, look at Napoleon --but we went right on. Look at Harpo Marx --the world went around, it didn't stop for a second. It's sad but true. John Kennedy, right? — Bob Dylan

I've never written a political song. Songs can't save the world. I've gone through all that. — Bob Dylan

The world of research has gone berserk. Too much paper work. — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

I've been up the mountain and I had a choice. Should I come down? So I came down. God said, Okay, you've been up on the mountain, now you go down. You're on your own, free. Check in later, but now you're on your own. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan was again an entirely new person - this time old, craggy, cynical, and world-weary, as in "Not Dark Yet". — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Quotes About Songs

With your silhouette when the sunlight dims Into your eyes where the moonlight swims, And your match-book songs and your gypsy hymns, Who among them would try to impress you? -Bob Dylan, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (1966) — Bob Dylan

How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see? — Bob Dylan

I'm used to writing songs and songs-I can fill em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book (Chronicles, Vol. 1), you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted. — Bob Dylan

May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung. — Bob Dylan

People think they know me from my songs. But my repertoire of songs is so wide-ranging that you'd have to be a madman to figure out the characteristics of the person who wrote all those songs. — Bob Dylan

Most songs have bridges in them, to distract listeners from the main verses of a song so they don't get bored. My songs don't have a lot of bridges because lyric poetry never had them. — Bob Dylan

I like spiritual songs. They struck me as truthful and serious. They brought me down to earth and they lifted me up all in the same moment. — Bob Dylan

Once you think you know the song, then you have go and see how other people have done it. — Bob Dylan

As long as you give my friend Jonah Lehrer a free pizza, I'll write a song about your restaurant. — Bob Dylan

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs. — Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Bob Dylan

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. — Bob Dylan

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

How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see? — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

How many roads must a man walk down.. Before you can call him a Man. — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations. — Bob Dylan

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

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

Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean. — Bob Dylan

If you want to know how to please a woman, just talk to a neuroscience major from Columbia. — Bob Dylan

Play it fuckin' loud! — Bob Dylan

May you stay Forever Young — Bob Dylan

Steal a little and they throw you in jail Steal a lot and they make you king. — Bob Dylan

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

Yesterday is just a memory. — Bob Dylan

Popular music had never had lyrical sophistication of this type [like Bob Dylan]; wit, to be sure, but "Darkness at the break of noon/Shadows even the silver spoon/The handmade blade, the child's balloon/Eclipses both the sun and moon/To understand you know too soon/ There is no sense in trying"? No. — Bob Dylan

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

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky. — Bob Dylan

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

The dirt of gossip blows into my face and the dust rumors cover me. But if the arrow is straight and the point is slick, it can pierce through dust no matter how thick. — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

Being on tour is like being in limbo. It's like going from nowhere to nowhere. — Bob Dylan

Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. — Bob Dylan

Don't Ask Me Nothing About Nothing, I Just Might Tell You the Truth — Bob Dylan

There must be some kind of way out of here,' said the joker to the thief. — Bob Dylan

In 1975,Bob Dylan was almost 10 years past his prime - and then he released the best album of his career, Blood on the Tracks. Written and recorded amid a painful divorce, Blood on the Tracks is proof that heartbreak makes great art - just as many of the albums that followed were the opposite. — Bob Dylan

For whose sake did you live, for whose sake did you die? Forgive me, baby, for what I didn't do. — Bob Dylan

To live outside the law, you must be honest. — Bob Dylan

Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be. — Bob Dylan

All I can do is be me, whoever that is. — Bob Dylan

Money doesn't talk, it swears. — Bob Dylan

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

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

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes, blown out on the trail; hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn, "Come in," she said, "I'll give ya shelter from the storm." — Bob Dylan

Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything. — Bob Dylan

There is nothing so stable as change. — Bob Dylan

Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb. — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

I'll remember you. When I've forgotten all the rest.You to me were true. You to me were the best. — Bob Dylan

I say there're no depressed words just depressed minds. — Bob Dylan

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be. — Bob Dylan

People are crazy and times are strange ... I used to care but things have changed — Bob Dylan

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

I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public. — Bob Dylan

I fought with my twin, the enemy within. — Bob Dylan

Come senators, congressmen, Please heed the call, Don't stand in the doorway, Don't block up the hall, For he that gets hurt, Will be he who has stalled, The battle outside ragin', Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, For the times they are a-changin'... — Bob Dylan

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you. — Bob Dylan

And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking. — Bob Dylan

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. — Bob Dylan

Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule. — Bob Dylan

I put one on the turntable and when the needle dropped, I was stunned - didn't know whether I was stoned or straight. — Bob Dylan

Don't criticize what you can't understand. — Bob Dylan

Life Lessons by Bob Dylan

1. Bob Dylan's lyrics often focus on themes of perseverance, resilience, and the importance of staying true to yourself. Through his music, he encourages us to stay strong in the face of adversity and to never give up on our dreams.
2. He also emphasizes the power of self-expression, urging us to speak out against injustice and to use our voice to make a difference in the world.
3. Finally, Dylan's music reminds us to keep an open mind and to be open to change, as it is often the only way to grow and find true fulfillment in life.