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.

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

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

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.

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.

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

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

When you’ve got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

Treating your adversary with respect is striking soft in battle.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning Good morning at total strangers.

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it as not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o clock is a scoundrel.

The pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

When any calamity has been suffered the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.