Ethel Barrymore Quotes

The best time to make friends is before you need them.

When life knocks you to your knees, and it will, why, get up! If it knocks you to your knees again, as it will, well, isn't that the best position from which to pray?

You grow up the day you have the first real laugh at yourself.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure - if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

You must learn, day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon.

The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.

Is everybody happy? I want everybody to be happy. I know I'm happy.

I never let them cough. They wouldn't dare.

Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both.

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.

[on Hollywood] It looks, it feels, as though it had been invented by a Sixth Avenue peepshow man.

[At age 76:] A good life is like a good play -- it has to have a satisfying and exciting third act.

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a MaCaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself.

When life knocks you to your knees and it will why get up! If it knocks you to your knees again as it will well isn't that the best position from which to pray?

Wrinkles should only indicate where smiles have been.

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh -- at yourself.