Quotes to inspire and reflect

Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it’s the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

Thunder on the Left.

When Abraham Lincoln was murdered

[ Drawing his beard aside before placing his head on the block :] This hath not offended the king.

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.

Utopia.

Oh! ever thus, from childhood’s hour,

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

Si les triangles faisoient un Dieu, ils lui donneroient trois côtés .

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty. . . . Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.

Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.

How can anyone be Persian?

No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

Chaque homme porte la forme entière de l’humaîne condition .

Quand je me jouë à ma chatte, qui sçait si elle passe son temps de moy plus que je ne fay d’elle .

The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.

I want . . . death to find me planting my cabbages.

C’est ce dequoy j’ay le plus de peur que la peur .

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

I am myself the matter of my book.

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, and ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray.

Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.

People feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, of any kind of nature—and it won’t hurt your feelings—like it’s happening to your clothing.

A career is born in public—talent in privacy.

[ Responding to a question about whether she had posed for a calendar in 1947 with nothing on :] I had the radio on.

I just want to be wonderful.

[ Declining an invitation to a party :]

Le Malade Imaginaire .

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.

What the devil was he doing in that galley?

I will maintain it before the whole world.

Par ma foi! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j’en susse rien .

Here [in Paris] they hang a man first, and try him afterwards.

All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.

Il faut manger pour vivre et non pas vivre pour manger .

You’ve asked for it, Georges Dandin, you’ve asked for it.

Nous avons changé tout cela .

Wilson Mizner . . . recalls his embarrassment when he first came into the world, and found a woman in bed with him.

I never saw a mob rush across town to do a good deed.

Treat a whore like a lady and a lady like a whore.

You sparkle with larceny.

You’re a mouse studying to be a rat.

Hello, sucker!

[ On his deathbed, telling a priest he had no need to speak with him :] I’ve been talking to your boss, Father.

Be kind to everyone on the way up; you’ll meet the same people on the way down.

Human beings . . . they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It’s kind of boring, isn’t it?

Everybody thinks of economics whether he is aware of it or not. In joining a political party and in casting his ballot, the citizen implicitly takes a stand upon essential economic theories.

As he saw it, there was only one choice—to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.