Live like Bill Murray — his philosophy and humor

• When he discovered his cab driver was a saxophone player who never had time to play, Bill had him pull over so the driver could practice in the backseat while Bill drove.
• Bill Murray once gave a waiter $50 to take the acting classes he wanted to take.
• When a stranger in the Atlanta Airport told Bill that she loved him, he replied that he loved her too and kissed her on the mouth.

Over the last few years, Bill Murray has been making headlines for crashing parties, photobombing, and randomly popping up in people’s lives. He does any funny thing he wants.

Ashley Donald and Erik Rogers were in the midst of a photoshoot in downtown Charleston when all of a sudden, Murray appeared.

He got behind a bar in 2010 and started serving drinks. No matter what anyone asked for, he just gave him or her tequila :)

After a golf tournament in St. Andrews, Bill Murray met a woman who invited him to a party. Naturally, he showed up. She was concerned that there were not enough clean dishes so he proceeds to clean enough dishes to drink out of, charms the party by accepting vodka out of a coffee mug, and before he left he cleaned up the ever-growing pile of dishes.

During the renovation of Poets House in 2009, Bill Murray held a short poetry reading with the construction workers, as a gesture of appreciation for their work.

Murray gave everyone in the restaurant a good laugh when, like a thief in the night, he stole french fries from a random guy and told him: “No one will ever believe you.”

In many of his movies, Bill Murray doesn’t seem to be taking the plot seriously

This is the key to his humor and acting. He stands slightly at a distance from everything, enabling him to maintain a dryly humorous commentary about what’s going on around him. Murray is perpetually sarcastic.

One explanation might be Murray’s relationship to Sufi mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. According to the late Harold Ramis, Bill Murray was a student of Gurdjieff, a kind of guru who “used to act really irrationally to his students almost as if trying to teach them object lessons”.

Gurdjieff, like most mystics, aimed at freeing the minds of men from illusion or waking people up to the reality of their own freedom. He taught people to find the truth in everyday life. There is something really wise we should learn about life.

Is Bill Murray’s whole career an attempt to wake people up to some kind of enlightenment? Or is it just a joke? I don’t know. But here are some of his awesome and inspirational quotes: