When I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally my husband. If he had lived, I’m sure I would have played his mother. That’s the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.
—Lillian Gish (American Actress)
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
—Laurens van der Post (South African Explorer, Writer)
Winning in life is failing. My idea of a winner is someone who fails first and then moves. Failing gives you a library of information that you’ve got to have so in the next situation you can use this body of knowledge. Failure is a teacher. It’s exciting learning how to live on this planet with yourself and the others around you. It’s a wonderful, lifelong path.
—Irene Kassorla (American Psychologist)
Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.
—Henri Nouwen (Dutch Catholic Priest)
An unlettered king is a crowned ass.
—Latin Proverb
Faith is one foot on the ground, one foot in the air, and a queasy feeling in the stomach.
—Mother Angelica (American Roman Catholic Nun)
Believe me my young friend; there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
—Kenneth Grahame (Scottish Children’s Writer)
Man must search for what is right, and let happiness come on its own.
—Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (Swiss Educator)
You cannot chase a dollar and an ideal at the same time.
—Austin O’Malley (American Aphorist, Ophthalmologist)
I learn by going where I have to go.
—Theodore Roethke (American Poet)
Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of his life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own.
—William Ewart Gladstone (English Liberal Statesman)
Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)
Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
—Bertrand A. Russell (British Philosopher, Mathematician)
If they don’t depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.
—Penelope Fitzgerald (British Novelist, Biographer)
The rhythm of life is intricate but orderly, tenacious but fragile. To keep that in mind is to build the key to survival.
—Shirley Hufstedler (American Lawyer, Jurist)