Top 70 Leo Rosten Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Money can’t buy happiness, but neither can poverty.”

— Leo Rosten

2. “I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all...”

— Leo Rosten

3. “Where there is too much, something is missing.”

— Leo Rosten

4. “I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.”

— Leo Rosten

5. “First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.”

— Leo Rosten

6. “The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to have it make a difference that you lived at all-using the talents that God has given you for the betterment of others.”

— Leo Rosten

7. “Some things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them.”

— Leo Rosten

8. “Thinking is harder work than hard work.”

— Leo Rosten

9. “We see things as we are, not as they are.”

— Leo Rosten

10. “Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.”

— Leo Rosten

11. “Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.”

— Leo Rosten

12. “If you are going to do something wrong, at least enjoy it.”

— Leo Rosten

13. “I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people believe.”

— Leo Rosten

14. “The hardest part of growing up is learning how to wait.”

— Leo Rosten

15. “If at first you don’t succeed, before you try again, stop to figure out what you did wrong.”

— Leo Rosten

16. “Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.”

— Leo Rosten

17. “Humor is the affectionate communication of insight.”

— Leo Rosten

18. “O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.”

— Leo Rosten

19. “The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.”

— Leo Rosten

20. “It is not that which is beautiful that pleases us, but that which pleases is is called beautiful.”

— Leo Rosten

21. “When in trouble, mumble.”

— Leo Rosten

22. “The love of money is the source of an enormous amount of good; the fact that the good is a by-product of the selfish pursuit of riches has nothing to do with its indisputable value.”

— Leo Rosten

23. “A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.”

— Leo Rosten

24. “Words sing. They hurt. They teach. They sanctify. They were man’s first, immeasurable feat of magic. They liberated us from ignorance and our barbarous past.”

— Leo Rosten

25. “What’s green, hangs on a wall and whistles?”

— Leo Rosten

26. “Why did God give me two ears and one mouth? So that I will hear more and talk less.”

— Leo Rosten

27. “Acting is a form of deception, and actors can mesmerize themselves almost as easily as an audience.”

— Leo Rosten

28. “If God lived on earth,” goes a sardonic Yiddish saying, “people would knock out all His windows.”

— Leo Rosten

29. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, please paint me the Gettysburg Address.”

— Leo Rosten

30. “I sometimes think there is a dimension beyond the four of experience and Einstein: insight, that fifth dimension which promises to liberate us from bondage to the long, imperfect past.”

— Leo Rosten

31. “Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind.”

— Leo Rosten

32. “You can learn much about life from a checker game: surrender one to take two; don’t make two moves at one time; move up, not down; and when you reach the top, you may move as you like.”

— Leo Rosten

33. “You understand people better if you look at them-no matter how old or impressive or important they may be-as if they were children. For most men never mature; they simply grow taller.”

— Leo Rosten

34. “The fellow who laughs last may laugh best, but he gets the reputation of being very slow-witted.”

— Leo Rosten

35. “There was no answer, no solution, no sop, no deliverance. What, then, did I do? I read faster.”

— Leo Rosten

36. “Hope is ambiguous, but fear is precious.”

— Leo Rosten

37. “For some not to be martyrs is martyrdom indeed.”

— Leo Rosten

38. “Extremists think ‘communication’ means agreeing with them.”

— Leo Rosten

39. “Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games – but not with pleasure.”

— Leo Rosten

40. “Satire is focused bitterness.”

— Leo Rosten

41. “The purpose of life is not to be happy, the purpose of life is to matter...”

— Leo Rosten

42. “In the dark colony of night, when I consider man’s magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.”

— Leo Rosten

43. “Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.”

— Leo Rosten

44. “Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.”

— Leo Rosten

45. “Chutzpa is that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”

— Leo Rosten

46. “Her cooking suggested she had attended the Cordon Noir.”

— Leo Rosten

47. “People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.”

— Leo Rosten

48. “A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they’re dead.”

— Leo Rosten

49. “The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that, perhaps, is what makes him different from others.”

— Leo Rosten

50. “SCENE: Classroom, Lower East Side, 1926. Teacher: “Who can tell us where the Romanian border is?” Student: “In the park with my aunt, and my mother doesn’t trust him!”

— Leo Rosten