Roald Dahl

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

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

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.

There are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t started wondering about yet.

I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.

If you are good, life is good.

Our own life has to be our message.

As the Spanish proverb says, He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him. So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist the parachute.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.

I was brought up to hate and fear liberty. I came to love it. That is the secret of my whole career.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Listening to both sides does not necessarily bring about a correct judgment.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.