Top 40 Helen Hayes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The expert at anything was once a beginner.”

— Helen Hayes

Featured in: Hard Work Quotes, Education Quotes, Experience Quotes, Growth Quotes, Quotes About Skills

2. “If you rest, you rust.”

— Helen Hayes

Featured in: Perseverance Quotes, Action Quotes, Positive Work Quotes, Work Ethic Quotes, Taking Action Quotes

3. “Always aim for achievement, and forget about success.”

— Helen Hayes

4. “Age is not important unless you’re a cheese.”

— Helen Hayes

5. “When books are opened, we discover that we have wings.”

— Helen Hayes

6. “When it comes to staying tuned: if you rest, you rust.”

— Helen Hayes

7. “We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.”

— Helen Hayes

Featured in: Hero Quotes

8. “All through the long winter, I dream of my garden. On the first day of spring, I dig my fingers deep into the soft earth. I can feel its energy, and my spirits soar.”

— Helen Hayes

9. “Childhood is a short season.”

— Helen Hayes

10. “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 theatre.”

— Helen Hayes

11. “Everybody starts at the top, and then has the problem of staying there. Lasting accomplishment, however, is still achieved through a long, slow climb and self-discipline.”

— Helen Hayes

12. “Perhaps we have been misguided into taking too much responsibility from our children, leaving them too little room for discovery.”

— Helen Hayes

13. “People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach retirement age seem very admirable to me.”

— Helen Hayes

14. “Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.”

— Helen Hayes

15. “Love is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.”

— Helen Hayes

16. “Mere longevity is a good thing for those who watch Life from the side lines. For those who play the game, an hour may be a year, a single day’s work an achievement for eternity.”

— Helen Hayes

17. “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

18. “Yes, I have doubted. I have wandererd off the path. I have been lost. But I always returned. It is beyond the logic I seek. It is intuitive – an intrinsic, built-in sense of direction. I seem to find my way home. My faith has wavered but has saved me.”

— Helen Hayes

19. “In this sometimes turbulent world, the river is a cosmic symbol of durability and destiny; awesome, but steadfast. In this period of deep national concern, I wish everyone could live for a while beside a great river.”

— Helen Hayes

20. “The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity – love. And the story of a love is not important – what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.”

— Helen Hayes

21. “All my dogs have been scamps and thieves and troublemakers and I’ve adored them all.”

— Helen Hayes

22. “Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.”

— Helen Hayes

23. “Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.”

— Helen Hayes

24. “Egocentrics are attracted to the inept. It gives them one more excuse for patting themselves on the back.”

— Helen Hayes

25. “The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.”

— Helen Hayes

26. “We may be living in the twentieth century, in resplendent sophistication. But deep down, most of us find ourselves still in the Stone Age of superstition.”

— Helen Hayes

27. “The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life.”

— Helen Hayes

28. “I’m leaving the screen because I don’t think I am very good in the pictures and I have this beautiful dream that I’m elegant on the stage.”

— Helen Hayes

29. “One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.”

— Helen Hayes

30. “I cry out for order and find it only in art.”

— Helen Hayes

31. “The faster we travel, the less there is to see.”

— Helen Hayes

32. “When traveling with someone, take large does of patience and tolerance with your morning coffee.”

— Helen Hayes

33. “There’s a little vanity chair that Charlie gave me the first Christmas we knew each other. I’ll not be parting with that, nor our bed – the four-poster – I’ll be needing that to die in.”

— Helen Hayes

34. “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

35. “At 50, you need to laugh about your age. If you don’t, everybody else will do it for you. Happy birthday, old chum!”

— Helen Hayes

36. “The theatre demanded of its members stamina, good digestion, the ability to adjust, and a strong sense of humor. There was no discomfort an actor didn’t learn to endure. To survive, we had to be horses and we were.”

— Helen Hayes

Featured in: Strong Quotes

37. “Stardom can be a gilded slavery.”

— Helen Hayes

38. “An actress always knows when she’s hit it and mostly you haven’t; but once or twice I think I hit it right, so maybe that’s good enough for one life.”

— Helen Hayes

39. “There is no racial or religious prejudice among people in the theater. The only prejudice is against bad actors, especially successful ones.”

— Helen Hayes

40. “There is only one terminal dignity – love.”

— Helen Hayes

41. “In the last stages of a final illness, we need only the absence of pain and the presence of family.”

— Helen Hayes

42. “When Charles first saw our child Mary, he said all the proper things for a new father. He looked upon the poor little red thing and blurted, “She’s more beautiful than the Brooklyn Bridge.””

— Helen Hayes

43. “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

44. “We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resiliance to push on.”

— Helen Hayes