14 Dr. Seuss Quotes: The Genius of Theodor Seuss Geisel!

He was an American children’s author, political cartoonist, and animator named Theodor Seuss Geisel. However, you may know him better as Dr. Seuss, the creator of many of the most popular children’s books of all-time! At the time of his death, he published over 60 books which sold over 600 million copies and were translated into over 20 languages!

Some of his most famous books included The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

His writing style was uniquely his own

According to Seussville.com, his writing was:

“A separate category of unique vivacity coupled with a manipulation of everyday words and names to achieve rhymes or desired beats per line. The verse style found throughout most of Seuss’s work was the anapestic tetrameter (Fenkl, 2002). This style involved using words consisting of two short syllables followed by one long syllable or using words consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable. The verses were then compiled into groupings of four lines. Along with this metric method, Seuss also utilized italics, full capitalization, different colored words and different sized letters to steer the reader down the paths of his books.” ¹

Even though he created many great stories for children to help stimulate their literary growth, his stories also touched on serious themes that could be enjoyed and understood by those of any generation.

Many of those serious themes can be seen in many of the Dr. Seuss quotes that we will review in today’s blog post:

(1)  “Be yourself and the people that don’t mind are the people that matter.”

Make it actionable:  Be yourself; those who matter most will accept you as you are.

(2)  “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”

Make it actionable: Take the time to figure out the right question and that will lead you to the correct answer.

(3)  “Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”

Make it actionable:  Take time to sit and think and don’t always accept the status quo. Check out our recent post on second order thinking. Although, I don’t really like the word try as it implies you are likely to fail – I prefer the word ‘do’.

(4)  “You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.”

Make it actionable:  Be present and observe what is going on around you, you never know what you may see or learn!

(5)  “You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.”

Make it actionable: Never stop learning and take time every day to learn on your own!

(6)  “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”

Make it actionable:  As Howie said in a recent video, take time to zone out and daydream – BUT just not at work!

(7)  “There’s no limit to how much you’ll know, depending how far beyond zebra you go.”

Make it actionable: Don’t let others set limits on what you can learn and do. And don’t set limits on yourself or others either!

(8)  “You can find magic
wherever you look.
Sit back and relax,
all you need is a book.”

 Make it actionable:  Read, read and read some more!

(9)  “If you want to catch beasts you don’t see every day,
You have to go places quite out of the way,
You have to go places no others can get to.
And you have to get cold and you have too get wet, too.”

Make it actionable:  Reaching your goals requires great effort and doing things others aren’t prepared to do.

(10)  “And when they played they really played. And when they worked they really worked.”

Make it actionable: Whatever you are doing, make sure you are focused on it and nothing else.

(11)  ”You have to be odd to be number one.”

Make it actionable:  If you want to be the best at anything, you will need to do things differently and make more sacrifices than everyone else.

(12)  “It doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is what it will become.”

Make it actionable:  Understand where you are is not where you will end up. Have a vision of what you want to become.

 (13)  “Look at life through the wrong end of the telescope.”

Make it actionable:  Sometimes we need to look at things differently in life to gain a different perspective.

(14)  “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.”

Make it actionable: I feel like the Good Doctor is talking directly to me the blogger with this one.

And it reminds me of something I read recently in a book on writing called The Elements of Style by William Strunk, who goes on to say:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

On that note, I hear you Dr. “Zoice”, I hear you loud and clear, I’m trying to make my writing more concise!

Until next time…PYMFP!
–Rick

By the way, in case you are wondering why I called him Dr. “Zoice”…

…the correct pronunciation of his name is “Zoice”, not “Soose”. Turns out that Suess is a Bavarian name and it is his mother’s maiden name as his parents emigrated to the U.S. from Bavaria in the nineteenth century. ¹  You can impress your friends with that one!

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References

¹ http://www.seussville.com/#/author

250 Dr. Seuss Quotes by Arthur Austen Douglas

² The Elements of Style