Will Rogers quote

April 14, 2019 2:57 AM

Did Will Rogers (or some similarly folksy American dude like Mark Twain) really advise that you should "live your life haphazardly," as my dad used to say? I can't find the quote anywhere. Wondering if Ask Metafilter can help.
posted by johngoren to Education (4 answers total)

Might you/he be thinking of Kurt Vonnegut: "“We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”?
posted by runincircles at 3:34 AM on April 14, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: What Rogers did say about living life was: "“Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.” Twain's advice was "Let us endeavor so to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." Both of which seem to contradict the idea of living haphazardly. But then, remember that like Yogi Berra, Twain "said" a lot of things he didn't actually say. But Twain did, in fact, live pretty haphazardly, wrote haphazardly, and wrote about living haphazardly, even if he didn't say it explicitly.
posted by beagle at 6:04 AM on April 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I'm guessing that this is a misquotation from Oedipus:

“Why should a man whose life seems ruled by chance live in fear—a man who never looks ahead, who has no certain vision of his future? It’s best to live haphazardly, as best one can." - Jocasta (Oedipus)
posted by Lanark at 8:00 AM on April 14, 2019 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks! Also yeah it may not be good advice because every hit I found was about making sure you don’t live haphazardly.
posted by johngoren at 5:59 AM on April 15, 2019