Lee was a born pedagogue, never happier than when his children were learning to do something the right way. It is a testament to Lee’s affection and patience that his children did not rebel. In fact, they appear to have thrived.
Cats don’t think they’re owned by anybody. Even behind doors and windows, like amiable Wally, they’re free. Always. That may, in fact, be the most important thing about them.
Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one’s origins and one’s final achievement.
The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you’re playing by somebody else’s rules, while quietly playing by your own.
The purely agitation attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.
In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or ‘The Great War,’ as it was called until 1939.
Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.
This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can’t be happy as a success, it’s very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure.
The freedom to fail is vital if you’re going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.
When I was a child in England before the war, Christmas pudding always contained at least one shiny new sixpence, and it was considered a sign of great good luck for the new year to find one in your helping of the pudding.
Your chances of success are directly proportional to the degree of pleasure you desire from what you do. If you are in a job you hate, face the fact squarely and get out.
Some people are so famous that the legends about them and the cultural aftermath of their life altogether obscure the real human being.
The rich and famous expect to get a lot for their story, whether they are writing it themselves or not. It’s not that they need the money, of course; it’s a question of ego, like catching the biggest fish.
Of course the rich and famous tend to have more going on in their lives than ordinary people, but they aren’t always willing to tell the interesting bits.
While politicians may be forgiven for failing to predict the future – who can, alas? – it is amazing that they defiantly ignore the past.
I do not start with a full knowledge of the facts; the whole attraction of writing history is to educate myself: it is an exploration into the unknown – ‘a journey without maps,’ to borrow Graham Greene’s phrase.
One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.
Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one’s origins and one’s final achievement.
Years of standing in the limelight portraying other people for large amounts of money does not usually lead to a high degree of self-examination, let alone self-criticism.