Marie Dressler Quotations

Any fact is better established by two or three good testimonies than by a thousand arguments.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Character is what you have when nobody is looking.

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

We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.

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

There are very few persons who would think of inquiring into the private life of the newspaper dealer at the corner, or the druggist, or the doctor, or even a Mah Jong partner, but the moment one belongs to the theatrical profession, the public usually feels cheated unless it knows one's inmost thoughts of love.

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

Never shall I forget those naked, clean-swept little Canadian towns, one just like the other. Before I was twelve years old, I must have lived in fifty of them.

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

the human heart clings - even to its pain.

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

Now I know that lawyers must live, but I've never been able to understand why they have to live so blamed well!

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

I never weep over lost money, for I figure I'd rather go to the poorhouse once than go there every day.

... the more you love what you do, the harder it is to do it well enough to get by yourself.

I'll have my double chins in privacy.

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.

No vice is so bad as advice.

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

You're only as good as your last picture.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 ...

Only a few things are really important.