Bill Cosby Quotes

1. A word to the wise ain't necessary - it's the stupid ones that need the advice.


2. In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

3. I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

4. Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.

5. People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

6. Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

7. Women don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think - in a deeper voice.

8. You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

9. Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.

10. Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

11. Sex education may be a good idea in the schools, but I don't believe the kids should be given homework.



12. Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.

13. There is hope for the future because God has a sense of humor and we are funny to God.


14. You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who've never had any.


15. Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

16. Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.

17. No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

18. Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.

19. Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

20. Let us now set forth one of the fundamental truths about marriage: the wife is in charge.


21. A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he's in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station.

22. Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.

23. I am proud to be an American. Because an American can eat anything on the face of this earth as long as he has two pieces of bread.






24. Parents are not interested in justice, they're interested in peace and quiet.

25. If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.

26. The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.

27. I guess the real reason that my wife and I had children is the same reason that Napoleon had for invading Russia: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

28. And so the dentist says "Rinse." So you lean over, and you're lookin' at this miniature toilet bowl.

29. Gray hair is God's graffiti.


30. A grandchild is God's reward for raising a child.

31. The worst thing to do is to die while reading LIFE magazine.

32. Man can not live by bread alone...he must have peanut butter.

33. Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

34. In spite of the seven thousand books of expert advice, the right way to disciplne a child is still a mystery to most fathers and…mothers Only your grandmother and Genghis Khan know how to do it.

35. A sail boat that sails backwards can never see the sun rise.

36. The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.



37. And of course, when you see your brother in the toilet bowl…there's a little voice that say: "I wonder where he would go…"…if it hadn't been for his head…

38. When you become senile, you won't know it.




39. Nobody ever says: "Can I have your beets?"

40. The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.

41. YOU are a genius!…and I am a genius because I married you.








42. It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful.

43. It was the arts, those noble expressions of the human spirit that are communicated through literature, dance, song, film, drama, painting and sculpture, among the many other such creative means, that helped articulate the sufferings of (these) people that were heard around the globe.

44. All children have brain damage!









45. If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be appreciated, shut up.

46. Suddenly, this romantic agony was enriched by a less romantic one: I had to go to the bathroom. Needless to say, I couldn't let her know about this urge, for great lovers never did such things. The answer to "Romeo Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?" was not "In the men's room, Julie".

47. Old is always fifteen years from now.

48. In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.

49. As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by "survival of the fittest".

50. I wasn't always black. there was this freckle that just grew and grew…



51. That's why ears have cartilage, to keep them from flapping.

52. Is the glass half full, or half empty? It depends on whether you're pouring, or drinking.

53. Zip zop wop boopity bop.

54. The heart of marriage is memories; and if the two of you happen to have the same ones and can savor your reruns, then your marriage is a gift from the gods.

55. That married couples can live together day after day is a miracle that the Vatican has overlooked.

56. Men and women belong to different species and communications between them is still in its infancy.

57. Any man today who returns from work, sinks into a chair, and calls for his pipe is a man with an appetite for danger.





58. My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.

59. Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.



60. The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

61. Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.

62. I am certainly not an authority on love because there are no authorities on love, just those who've had luck with it and those who haven't.

63. Did you ever see the customers in health - food stores? They are pale, skinny people who look half - dead. In a steak house, you see robust, ruddy people. They're dying, of course, but they look terrific.

64. Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.





65. There is no labor a person does that is undignified; if they do it right.

66. Parents are people who yell and they yell and they yell and they yell. And you already have the point...and they're still yelling.

67. I don't have a problem believing in God and Jesus. But in Genesis one has to wonder about these sentences that just go on and end without finishing. The thought is unfinished. Where did Adam go? What is he doing? Hello? There has to be some pages missing.




68. Every success story has a parent who says: "over my dead body." Every success story has an old person who walks up to you and says, when you're acting the fool, "you know I worry about you sometimes."

69. Immortality is a long shot, I admit. But somebody has to be first.







70. Kids need to remember that when you put something on Twitter, it's not like whispering to your friend, you've put it on a billboard that the whole world, including your own kids someday, can see.

71. For college seniors there should be a week of being allowed to cry. Just break down and cry because you are scared and don't know what's next.




72. If you have no faith, you've lost your battle.

73. I often try to tell kids to think about all the people who love you, don't cry over the one person who doesn't.

74. The first-born in every family is always dreaming for an imaginary older brother or sister who will look out for them.

75. There are some people who have trouble recognizing a mess.

76. Family is conflict and it's something that we all relate to.

77. I have to follow my thoughts and mine for the gold. I have to dig it out.




78. I cannot understand how the education of this United States of America has been fooled time and time again. Either make it separate but equal or integrate, therefore it will be equal. And it has been separate and unequal.

79. I want all this loud profanity in the street stopped. I want people to think about choices.

80. I was put in remedial everything.

81. I think the part of media that romanticizes criminal behavior, things that a person will say against women, profanity, being gangster, having multiple children with multiple men and women and not wanting to is prevalent. When you look at the majority of shows on television they placate that kind of behavior.



82. I'm old, not dead.

83. Social networking helps reach people easier and quicker.

84. I'm not the healthiest, but I am healthy. I'm healthy to the point where there are things that I have to eat that I don't want to eat, but I eat it because I'm enjoying staying alive.





85. If you speak your mind and if it is true what you're saying, then I think the integrity of what you're saying carries through.

86. We've got to get the gun out of the hands of people who are supposed to be on neighborhood watch.



87. We're not raising children with the love that we need to.


88. When I say, I don't care what white people think, I mean that.

89. When a person has a gun, sometimes their mind clicks that this thing will win arguments and straighten people out.

90. When I was a boy if a girl got pregnant the shame was placed on her and the boy could get away.



91. When you carry a gun, you mean to harm somebody, kill somebody.

92. When you introduce competition into the public school system, most studies show that schools start to do better when they are competing for students.

93. You can't compete with Walmart. But you can have smaller businesses that are successful.






94. The measure of overexposure is not how many times people see you on TV or in the bookstores. It's whether you can maintain the quality of your entertainment. If you can, people will always be glad to see you.

95. I didn't like what was on TV in terms of sitcoms - it had nothing to do with the color of them - I just didn't like any of them. I saw little kids, let's say 6 or 7 years old, white kids, black kids. And the way they were addressing the father or the mother, the writers had turned things around, so the little children were smarter than the parent or the caregiver. They were just not funny to me. I felt that it was manipulative and the audience was looking at something that had no responsibility to the family.

96. My father established our relationship when I was seven years old. He looked at me and said: "You know, I brought you in this world, and I can take you out. And it don't make no difference to me, I'll make another one look just like you."





97. I recently turned fifty, which is young for a tree, mid-life for an elephant, and ancient for a quarter-miler, whose son now says: "Dad I just can't run the quarter with you anymore unless I bring something to read."

98. Listen to John Coltrane enough and after two bars, just two bars at any place, and you know that's him. We all have signature things that happen to be similar that you can predict and you try to stay away from that except the rhythms: those pauses, they're part of my signature, the part where I know when I say nothing, I already painted enough, led enough and I don't even have to say anything. But those pauses don't belong to me. Jack Benny was one of the first guys in comedy to make the anticipation so great that during the pause people start to laugh before the execution.

99. Fathers are the geniuses of the house because only a person as intelligent as we could fake such stupidity.




100. I don't think you can bring the races together by joking about the differences between them. I'd rather talk about the similarities, about what's universal in their experiences.

101. In America…the seven ages of man have become preschooler, Pepsi generation, baby boomer, mid-lifer, empty-nester, senior citizen, and organ donor.

102. If the audience knows you can be funny when you want to be, they will be willing to wait for that payoff.




103. My father wanted me to play pro football, and he didn't like the fact that I'd left school. And he said: "It takes a man to play football. And any fool can go up on the stage and make an ass of himself."

104. The day (Phylicia Rashad) got the part (of Clair on the Cosby Show), I was sitting in the back, and women were…reading with a couple of the kids. And many of them when… they were going to tell the kid off, started the head moving like a bobble doll… and when Phylicia's turn came and she was reading with Malcolm (Jamal-Warner) and he said something to her… there was a pause from her. And do you know what she did in that pause? She did something with her eyes. She didn't bop her head; she didn't throw her hand up on her hip; and she didn't say anything out loud. She cut a look that said, oh, maybe four or five things - and none of them were good. And I turned to Marcy, and I said: "That's Clair."

105. I am not the boss of my house. I don't know when I lost it. I don't know if I ever had it. But I have seen the boss's job and I do not want it.



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