Bette Davis citations

“There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.”

“Pleasure of love lasts but a moment, Pain of love lasts a lifetime.”

“If everybody likes you, you're pretty dull.”

“When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.”

“Miss Bankhead isn't well enough known nationally to warrant my imitating her.”

“If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.”

“The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he's dead.”

“You should know me well enough by now to know I don't ask for things I don't think I can get.”

“Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, to yielding.”

“Everybody has a heart. Except some people.”

“I'm the nicest goddamn dame that ever lived.”

“I was thought to be 'stuck up.' I wasn't. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.”

“You will never be happier than you expect. To change your happiness, change your expectation.”

“I am just too much.”

“A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.”

“Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn't do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up.”

“I'de luv to kiss ya but I just washed my hair.”

“Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.”

“To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lovely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.”

“I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oftentimes disagreeable… I suppose I'm larger than life.”

“Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it's not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world.”

“Getting old is not for sissies.”

“I will not retire while I've still got my legs and my makeup box.”

“Life is the past, the present and the perhaps.”

“Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.”

“I never wished I’d been a man. I always felt like a woman and wanted to be a woman. I wanted to be fulfilled professionally and personally, as a woman. There are some who might say I had penis envy, but I only had penis admiration.”

“Success only breeds a new goal”

“To look back is to relax one's vigil.”

“Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child. Discipline is guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child.”