Top 35 Ruth Gordon Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it by use.”

— Ruth Gordon

2. “My body is on the earth, but my head is in the stars.”

— Ruth Gordon

3. “Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.”

— Ruth Gordon

4. “Try something new each day. After all, we’re given life to find it out. It doesn’t last forever.”

— Ruth Gordon

5. “Never give up. And never, under any circumstances, face the facts.”

— Ruth Gordon

6. “Sometimes what you want you don’t get until you don’t want it anymore.”

— Ruth Gordon

7. “The good that men do lives after them.”

— Ruth Gordon

8. “To be somebody, you must last.”

— Ruth Gordon

9. “I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this, yet allow themselves to be treated as that.”

— Ruth Gordon

10. “A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life.”

— Ruth Gordon

11. “The very best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance.”

— Ruth Gordon

12. “Vice, virtue – it’s best not to be too moral. You’ll cheat yourself out of too much life.”

— Ruth Gordon

13. “In our family we don’t divorce our men – we bury them.”

— Ruth Gordon

14. “To get it right, be born with luck or else make it. Never give up. A little money helps, but what really gets it right is to never face the facts.”

— Ruth Gordon

15. “Despair is your friend in show business. I don’t believe you can act if happiness is your lot. It’s the ups that keep you living and the downs that mete out talent.”

— Ruth Gordon

16. “Get up early in the morning before everybody has breathed up all the good air.”

— Ruth Gordon

17. “I think there is one smashing rule: never face the facts.”

— Ruth Gordon

18. “Courage is like a strain of yoghurt culture, if you have some you can have some more.”

— Ruth Gordon

19. “You have to have a talent for having talent.”

— Ruth Gordon

20. “Your first big trouble can be a bonanza if you live through it. Get through the first trouble, and you’ll probably make it through the next one.”

— Ruth Gordon

21. “Aim above morality. If you apply that to life, then youre bound to live life fully.”

— Ruth Gordon

22. “I’m sure the way to be happy is to live well beyond your means!”

— Ruth Gordon

23. “Don’t face the facts.”

— Ruth Gordon

24. “If you believe, then you hang on. If you believe, it means you’ve got imagination, you don’t need stuff thrown out on a blueprint, and don’t face facts-what can stop you? If I don’t make it today, I’ll come in tomorrow.”

— Ruth Gordon

25. “So easy to fall into a rut, isn’t it? Why should ruts be so comfortable and so unpopular?”

— Ruth Gordon

26. “Acting is the use of human experience with talent added...”

— Ruth Gordon

27. “Live long enough and you’ll come into pensions, a lovely thing. Presents every month from people you didn’t know cared.”

— Ruth Gordon

28. “Do people get moral when they don’t get ahead?”

— Ruth Gordon

29. “At seventy-four I’m getting minor raves on my looks, but I’m caught in the middle. Who knows what seventy-four looks like? Who cares? But if I’d listened to my friends, I could now lie and say I’m eighty-four. For eighty-four, the way I look is spectacular.”

— Ruth Gordon

30. “Get the knack of getting people to help you and also pitch in yourself.”

— Ruth Gordon

31. “Nothing dates one so dreadfully as to think someplace is uptown. At our age one must be watchful of these conversational gray hairs.”

— Ruth Gordon

32. “Discussing how old you are is the temple of boredom.”

— Ruth Gordon

33. “Pan me, don’t give me the part, publish everybody’s book but this one and I will still make it!”

— Ruth Gordon

34. “If you’re thinking of becoming a critic, why not make other plans?”

— Ruth Gordon

35. “I never got a job I didn’t create for myself.”

— Ruth Gordon

36. “When you finally learn how to do it, you’re too old for the good parts.”

— Ruth Gordon

37. “Anything that begins ‘I don’t know how to tell you this’ is never good news.”

— Ruth Gordon