Quotes by Helen Hayes

Age is not important unless you're a cheese.
– Helen Hayes
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
An actress's life is so transitory - suddenly you're a building.
– Helen Hayes
Childhood is a short season.
– Helen Hayes
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
I cry out for order and find it only in art.
– Helen Hayes
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
If you rest, you rust.
– Helen Hayes
Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.
– Helen Hayes
Life would give her everything of consequence, life would shape her, not we. All we were good for was to make the introductions.
– Helen Hayes
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
One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.
– Helen Hayes
Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
– Helen Hayes
The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
– Helen Hayes
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
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
We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.
– Helen Hayes
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
When traveling with someone, take large does of patience and tolerance with your morning coffee.
– Helen Hayes
My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that 'achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that's nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success.'
– Helen Hayes
Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.
– Helen Hayes
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
People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach retirement age seem very admirable to me.
– Helen Hayes
Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.
– Helen Hayes