Roald Dahl

Human ‘beans’ is the only animals that is killing their own kind.

If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sun beams and you will always look lovely!

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

The more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

For we put the power in the people.

A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it. Some Folks think they may Scold, Rail, Hate, Rob and Kill too; so it be but for God’s sake. But nothing in us unlike him, can please him.

Children are all foreigners.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

I’m out there to clean the plate. Once they’ve read what I’ve written on a subject, I want them to think, ‘That’s it!’ I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they’ve written a story, nobody will ever try it again.

Don’t think of yourself as indispensable or infallible. As Charles De Gaulle said, the cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.

I am stronger than my fear.

That which builds is better than that which is built.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.