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What's green, hangs on a wall and whistles? [A Herring]

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
Whistles
Herring
Hangs
Green
Wall

More quotes by Leo Rosten

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Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious.
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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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Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.
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.
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Dogs are getting bigger, according to a leading dog manufacturer.
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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.
Leo Rosten
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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.
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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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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Thinking is harder work than hard work.
Leo Rosten
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Where there is too much, something is missing.
Leo Rosten
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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.
Leo Rosten
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Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.
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
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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 hardest part of growing up is learning how to wait
Leo Rosten
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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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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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Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.
Leo Rosten
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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.
Leo Rosten