Roald Dahl

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

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

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.

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.

If you are good, life is good.

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.

I could not find the world if I searched ten years. I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.

Kings in this should imitate God, their mercy should be above their works.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

You are braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem. And smarter than you think.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all. [Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur.]

A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.

Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.