Helen Hayes Quotes

1. My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that "achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success".

2. Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.

3. I seem always to have reminded people of someone in their family. Perhaps I am the triumph of Plain Jane.







4. Age is not important unless you're a cheese.

5. We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resilience to push on.

6. I must refrain from talking too much about retirement. It's beginning to sound absurd.



7. Childhood is a short season.


8. We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.

9. I'm leaving the screen because I don't think I am very good in the pictures and I have this beautiful dream that I'm elegant on the stage.

10. From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.



11. Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

12. When traveling with someone, take large does of patience and tolerance with your morning coffee.

13. Mere longevity is a good thing for those who watch Life from the side lines. For those who play the game, an hour may be a year, a single day's work an achievement for eternity.


14. Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up…a lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

15. People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach retirement age seem very admirable to me.

16. The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.


17. Stardom can be a gilded slavery.


18. If you rest, you rust.

19. Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.

20. The good die young but not always. The wicked prevail but not consistently. I am confused by life, and I feel safe within the confines of the theatre.

21. The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life.


22. I cry out for order and find it only in art.

23. Everybody starts at the top, and then has the problem of staying there. Lasting accomplishment, however, is still achieved through a long, slow climb and self-discipline.

24. The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity - love. And the story of a love is not important - what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.





25. There's a little vanity chair that Charlie gave me the first Christmas we knew each other. I'll not be parting with that, nor our bed - the four-poster - I'll be needing that to die in.

26. I'm absolutely crazy about life...about the value of living and doing. I have a belief, too, that's there's another world out there and that one day I will be joining Charlie and Mary (the daughter who died at 19 from polio) and other people I love, and it consoles me to think about that.





27. Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.

28. One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.


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