Some bathroom graffiti for Sunday:
On the inside of the door of a stall in the ladies’ room a Korean Presbyterian church in Philadelphia:
Psalm 139:1
Lord, you have searched me out and known me; you know my sitting down and my rising up.
Another:
One I first saw about a year ago; fun for a 56-year-old to learn new grafitti. In one handwriting: “John 3:16“. Below it in a different handwriting: “Bill, about 4:30“.
Another:
From a Canadian university in the mid-1980s: “Jesus Saves”. Written underneath: “but Gretzky scores on the rebound!”
Many more below:
My favorite (and only) graffiti I remember from college is: “Jesus saves … Moses invests … Mongol hordes”.
Another:
When I was at the University of Iowa back in the ’90s I saw this gem:
Jesus lives!
Followed by:
In my penis!
Trumped by:
So it takes your penis three days to rise again?
Another:
During the 1970s, the preacher/faith healer/television evangelist Oral Roberts had a very successful ministry, but he was widely seen as a huckster by “mainline” Christians. Thus, a stall in a men’s room in Speer Library at Princeton Theological Seminary had the following graffiti: “Do you believe in Oral Roberts between consenting adults?”
Another shifts away from the porcelain god:
My favorite bathroom stall wisdom is this nugget seen in a stall in Peabody Hall, home of the University of Georgia philosophy department. It stated, quite simply: “I shit, therefore I am.”
More philosophy:
From a stall in Oxford:
“God is dead.” – Nietzsche
With the addition:
“Nietzsche is dead.” – God
Another reader:
Men’s room stall, UNC-Chapel Hill philosophy department: “Heisenberg may have been here.”
And another:
A reader wrote about the incongruity of writing to an erudite blogger about bathroom graffiti, but a few years ago I wondered into a bathroom at St. John’s College in Annapolis and had to take a picture of the graffiti that read “πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ muthafucka” and honor the wisdom of whoever wrote them. As a classics PhD, I knew those words to be adapted from a chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone “There are many terrible things [but none worse than man]” (line 332). This citation shows the contexts where πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ usually shows up.
One more:
Found in a men’s room on the 4th floor of the Philosophy Building at UCLA (circa 1968):
To be is to do—Sartre
To do is to be—Hegel
Do be do be do—Sinatra
The Dish 