Roald Dahl

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.

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

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

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

You’ve got to have a good spirit on the inside. That’s what’s really going to make you look like you’re ready to rock the world.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

Rarely promise, but, if lawful, constantly perform.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.