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.
--Helen Hayes
Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.
--Helen Hayes
Actors work and slave- and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.
--Helen Hayes
After all my years in the theater, I can look back on only a handful of moments that met my own standards of perfection. When you transcend yourself and really get inside the character, it's like being touched by God.
--Helen Hayes
Age is not important unless you're a cheese.
--Helen Hayes
Childhood is a short season.
--Helen Hayes
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it did alright by me.
--Helen Hayes
Egocentrics are attracted to the inept. It gives them one more excuse for patting themselves on the back.
--Helen Hayes
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. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.
--Helen Hayes
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.
--Helen Hayes
I cry out for order and find it only in art.
--Helen Hayes
If you rest, you rust.
--Helen Hayes
Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.
--Helen Hayes
Love is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
--Helen Hayes
Marriage is like a war. There are moments of chivalry and gallantry that attend the victorious advances and strategic retreats, the birth or death of children, the momentary conquest of loneliness, the sacrifice that ennobles him who makes it. But mostly there are the long dull sieges, the waiting, the terror and boredom. Women understand this better than men; they are better able to survive attrition.
--Helen Hayes
One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.
--Helen Hayes
Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
--Helen Hayes
People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach 'retirement' age seem very admirable to me.
--Helen Hayes
Sometimes I became so melancholic that I felt all actresses should be spayed so they couldn't have children. It's so very difficult to balance the careers of motherhood and the theater.
--Helen Hayes
The faster we travel, the less there is to see.
--Helen Hayes
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 theater.
--Helen Hayes
The hardest years in life are between ten and seventy.
--Helen Hayes
The old-fashioned idea that the simple piling up of experiences, one on top of another, can make you an artist, is, of course, so much rubbish. If acting were just a matter of experience, then any busy harlot could make Garbo's Camille pale.
--Helen Hayes
The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life.
--Helen Hayes
Found 24 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).