Marie Dressler Quotes

Only a few things are really important.

It is not how old you are, but how you are old.

By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.

If ants are such busy workers, how come they find time to go to all the picnics?

Character is what you have when nobody is looking.

Fate cast me to play the role of an ugly duckling with no promise of swanning. . . . I have played my life as a comedy rather than the tragedy many would have made of it.

The world doesn't go around on love between men and women. Lovers get very little done. But friends do. When you are past middle life - and I hope you have the rich experience of love along the way - don't think everything is all over. Don't regret the vanished cocktail when the stuffed turkey is about to come in. Flip out your napkin and bite into it! Friends you can gather around you in the later years of life are worth the whole thing.

If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly.

I contend that every woman has the right to feel beautiful, no matter how scrambled her features, or how indifferent her features.

Never one thing and seldom one person can make for a success. It takes a number of them merging into one perfect whole.

That's the unfortunate thing about death. It's so terribly final.

By the time we've hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons

There is a vast difference between success at twenty-five and success at sixty. At sixty, nobody envies you. Instead, everybody rejoices generously, sincerely, in your good fortune.

I'm too homely for a prima donna and too ugly for a soubrette.

I have had a couple of marriages, but like every other woman I had a perfect right to them.

I have no patience with women who measure and weigh their love like a country doctor dispensing capsules. If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly.

I enjoy reading biographies because I want to know about the people who messed up the world.

I'll have my double chins in privacy.

In order to represent life on the stage, we must rub elbows with life, live ourselves

To know that one has never really tried - that is the only death

I was born serious and I have earned my bread making other people laugh.

My instinct has always been to turn drawbacks into drawing cards.

I never ride horseback now because my sympathy with the under-dog is too keen. After we have a gone a few blocks, I always dismount and say to the horse: 'We'll walk it together, old dear.

You're only as good as your last picture.

If there's one thing I know, it's men. I ought to. It's been my life's work.