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The purpose of life is not to be happy, the purpose of life is to matter.

Leo Rosten

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Leo Rosten
Age: 88 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 1
Died: 1997
Died: January 1
Lexicographer
Linguist
Novelist
Political Scientist
Screenwriter
Writer
Lodz
Leo Calvin Rosten
Thoughtful
Kindness
Purpose
Happy
Matter
Life

More quotes by Leo Rosten

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Thinking is harder work than hard work.
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, please paint me the Gettysburg Address.
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Satire is focused bitterness.
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Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.
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Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious.
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You can learn much about life from a checker game: surrender one to take two don't make two moves at one time move up, not down and when you reach the top, you may move as you like.
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Her cooking suggested she had attended the Cordon Noir.
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What's green, hangs on a wall and whistles? [A Herring]
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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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Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.
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The first printed mention of bagels... is to be found in the Community Regulations of Kracow, Poland, for the year 1610 which stated that bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth.
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If you are going to do something wrong, at least enjoy it.
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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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Dogs are getting bigger, according to a leading dog manufacturer.
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If at first you don't succeed, before you try again, stop to figure out what you did wrong.
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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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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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O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
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Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.
Leo Rosten
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Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
Leo Rosten