Leo Calvin Rosten

Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.

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

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 have lived at all.

If you are going to do something wrong at least enjoy it.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

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.

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

Courage is the capacity to confirm what you can be imagined . . .

Any man that hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.

Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.