Best quotes from people born July 12

 

In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.—Emperor Julius Caesar (100 B.C.E.-44 B.C.E.)

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.—philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Look wise say nothing and grunt, speech was given to conceal thought. —physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919)

You push the button, we do the rest.—George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak Company (1854-1932)

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.—agricultural chemist George Washington Carver (1864-1943)

Happiness is an angel with a serious face.—painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. —engineer, philosopher, and futurist Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone, you'll never walk alone.—lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960)

Tonight I can write the saddest lines/I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.—Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.—comedian Milton Berle (1908-2002)

Bonus quote from Berle:

A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong.

Literary Bits for July 5

Top 10 quotes from Jean Cocteau, French poet, librettist, novelist, actor, film director, and painter born on July 5, 1889:

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

I am a lie that always speaks the truth.

An artist cannot speak about his art anymore than a plant can discuss horticulture.

And one more:

Poetry is indispensable—if I only knew what for.