When you get as old as I am and no longer have a husband or dog, and the children have long since left home, you can sit and get a little wiser by thinking. Then it’s time to edit your memories and start looking at your life again. First come the regrets, then come the wrongs you’ve done, mistakes you’ve made – and all the things you can sit and brood over if you’re already in a bad mood. But you can also understand people and contexts in a new way.
When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
You can beat 40 scholars with one fact, but you cannot beat one idiot with 40 facts.
My articles were based on something I wanted to change. Everyone has the right to a decent life, and I thought it was important to give vulnerable people support and confidence. I was brought up to respect other people.
I want to tell people how to live spiritually. After you’ve bought all your houses and clothes, you want something bigger.
If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.
The longer I stay at home, the more homeless I look.
You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.
If the heroes run and hide, who will stay and fight?
You have to take the wrinkles that come. And all those who get their skin sprayed and look like wounded warriors for a long time, become very little prettier, but look so sour. The smile is actually the best face-lift, I think.
In a rich man’s house, there is no place to spit in his face.
I knew we had to drive on cobblestones, but I didn’t know they had thrown them down from a helicopter.
A good breakfast can save the day.
With great powers comes great responsibilities.
When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving, him a liar: you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.
I am a bourgeois, but I am not a Left-woman. I was born a bourgeois, and I have always tried not to stand on a pedestal and say that I am a worker. That would be false talk. Nor during the many years when the red hirelings were around and held their noses at the thought of “Matador” and everything else I did. I’m not a peasant either. I was born a bourgeois, but that is why I can criticise the bourgeoisie and their shabby schemes, which I can easily see through.
Everything sounds deep when you don’t read books.
Even when your life seems most monotonous, what you do is always of real value — and importance to your fellow men.
Sometimes, the wrong train takes you to the right station.
I won! I won! I don’t have to go to school anymore.
When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times…I learned very early in life that: ‘Without a song, the day would never end; without a song, a man ain’t got a friend; without a song, the road would never bend – without a song.’ So I keep singing a song. Goodnight. Thank you.
In the past, we learned to cope with challenges ourselves. Today, a lot of people younger than me are not resistant to the vicissitudes and emotional challenges of life. If you’ve been told all your life that it’s the others who should spoil you and keep you free of problems, you’re probably a very sober person emotionally.
Wearing cheap clothes or driving an old car doesn’t make you broke. You got a family to feed not a community to impress.
A man should only work 4 hours a day so he may have time to devote himself to the arts and sciences.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.