Helen Hayes Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

The truth [is] that there is only one terminal dignity — love. And the story of love is not important — what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

Helen Hayes
From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot in front of the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings.

Helen Hayes
Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.

Helen Hayes
He could smell a sinner five miles away on a windless day.

Helen Hayes
Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

Helen Hayes
Why endeavor to straighten the road of life? The faster we travel, the less there is to see.

Helen Hayes
We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.

Helen Hayes
We are indeed a strange lot! There are times we doubt that we have any emotions we can honestly call our own. I have approached every dynamic scene change in my life the same way. When I married Charlie MacArthur, I sat down and wondered how I could play the best wife that ever was.... My love for him was the truest thing in my life; but it was still important that I love him with proper effect, that I act loving him with great style, that I achieve the ultimate in wifedom.

Helen Hayes
We grow up the day we are allowed to go somewhere alone and don't have to call home to say we arrived.

Helen Hayes
This is the day of instant genius. Everybody starts at the top, and then has the problem of staying there. Lasting accomplishment, however, is still achieved through a long, slow climb and self-discipline.

Helen Hayes
The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale.

Helen Hayes
What is talent? Perhaps it is an instinct for understanding the human heart.

Helen Hayes
Talent may not be for sale, but the best way to package and display your gift is.

Helen Hayes
It is a wise thing for a woman to keep a high regard for her husband's intelligence and competence, even when she realizes, as we all do, that he is not quite the hero she thought he was.

Helen Hayes
One has to protect oneself from the earnest friends who would help you in adversity.

Helen Hayes
I often wonder: Who will pick up the pieces of our damaged world? A poet, I think.

Helen Hayes
Egocentrics are attracted to the inept. It gives them one more excuse for patting themselves on the back.

Helen Hayes
We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart as if by centrifugal force and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together... I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.

Helen Hayes
They say stress is a killer. But I think no stress is equally deadly, especially as you get older. If your days just seem to slip by without any highs and lows, without some anxieties and pulse-quickening occurrences, you may not be really living.

Helen Hayes
Science is providing answers with such phenomenal speed that philosophy has lost track of the questions.

Helen Hayes
In the last states of a final illness, we need only the absence of pain and the presence of family.

Helen Hayes
Our house was always filled with dogs... They helped make our house a kennel, it is true, but the constant patter of their filthy paws and the dreadful results of their brainless activities have warmed me throughout the years.

Helen Hayes
Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.

Helen Hayes
No matter how real the emotion, the habit of acting is hard to break. If you are a star, then it follows that you must twinkle mightily. There is a price for stardom and, unfortunately, one's family shares in the payment.

Helen Hayes
Perhaps we have been misguided into taking too much responsibility from our children, leaving them too little room for discovery.

Helen Hayes
The flattering, if arbitrary, label, First Lady of the Theatre, takes its toll. The demands are great, not only in energy but eventually in dramatic focus. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a star to occupy an inch of space without bursting seams, cramping everyone else's style and unbalancing a play. No matter how self-effacing a famous player may be, he makes an entrance as a casual neighbor and the audience interest shifts to the house next door.

Helen Hayes
An actress always knows when she's hit it and mostly you haven't; but once or twice I think I hit it right, so maybe that's good enough for one life.

Helen Hayes
One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.

Helen Hayes
When I hear tell of the character and the loyalty and devotion of dogs, I remain unmoved. All of my dogs have been scamps and thieves and troublemakers and I've adored them all.

Helen Hayes
I think it's very important to be alone. Loneliness is just an idea that, I'm afraid, has something to do with self-pity.

Helen Hayes