Leo Rosten Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

Extremists think "communication" means agreeing with them.

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I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.

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Acting is a form of deception, and actors can mesmerize themselves almost as easily as an audience.

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Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.
Of W. C. Fields

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The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that, perhaps, is what makes him different from others.

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Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games - but not with pleasure.

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I sometimes think there is a dimension beyond the four of experience and Einstein: insight, that fifth dimension which promises to liberate us from bondage to the long, imperfect past

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The purpose of life is not to be happy at all. It is to be useful, to be honorable. It is to be compassionate. It is to matter, to have it make some difference that you lived.

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In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

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Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.

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Chutzpa is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan.

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Conservative: One who admires radicals a century after they're dead.

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I came to believe it not true that "the coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man only one." I think it is the other way around: It is the brave who die a thousand deaths. For it is imagination, and not just conscience, which doth make cowards of us all. Those who do not know fear are not truly brave.

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A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

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Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.

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Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.

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Dogs are getting bigger, according to a leading dog manufacturer.

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I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all..

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Yiddish is the Robin Hood of languages. It steals from the linguistically rich to give to the fledgling poor. It shows not the slightest hesitation in taking in houseguests—to whom it gives free room and board regardless of genealogy, faith, or exoticism.

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