Quote

You understand people better if you look at them-no matter how old or impressive or important they may be-as if they were children. For most men never mature they simply grow taller.

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
Never
Understand
Men
May
People
Better
Taller
Look
Impressive
Matter
Mature
Looks
Grow
Children
Simply
Important
Grows

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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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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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Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious.
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The fellow who laughs last may laugh best, but he gets the reputation of being very slow-witted.
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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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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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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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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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Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.
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The purpose of life is not to be happy, the purpose of life is to matter.
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Satire is focused bitterness.
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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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Thinking is harder work than hard work.
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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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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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Acting is a form of deception, and actors can mesmerize themselves almost as easily as an audience.
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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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Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
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Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.
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