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If at first you don't succeed, before you try again, stop to figure out what you did wrong.

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
Trying
Figure
Figures
Succeed
Stop
Wrong
Firsts
First

More quotes by Leo Rosten

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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.
Leo Rosten
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Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.
Leo Rosten
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Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
Leo Rosten
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What's green, hangs on a wall and whistles? [A Herring]
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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.
Leo Rosten
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Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
Leo Rosten
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Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious.
Leo Rosten
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Dogs are getting bigger, according to a leading dog manufacturer.
Leo Rosten
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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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The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to have it make a difference that you lived at all-using the talents that God has given you for the betterment of others.
Leo Rosten
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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.
Leo Rosten
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Satire is focused bitterness.
Leo Rosten
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Her cooking suggested she had attended the Cordon Noir.
Leo Rosten
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Where was it ever promised us that life on this earth can ever be easy, free from conflict and uncertainty, devoid of anguish and wonder and pain? … The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.
Leo Rosten
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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.
Leo Rosten
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Thinking is harder work than hard work.
Leo Rosten
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Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games - but not with pleasure.
Leo Rosten
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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.
Leo Rosten
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The love of money is the source of an enormous amount of good the fact that the good is a by-product of the selfish pursuit of riches has nothing to do with its indisputable value.
Leo Rosten
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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.
Leo Rosten