Bette Davis Quotes and Sayings

The Best Bette Davis Quotes:

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

Inspirational Bette Davis

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.

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

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

You will never be happier than you expect. To change your happiness, change your expectations.

Success only breeds a new goal

Bette Davis Quotes on Show Buisness

Good actors I’ve worked with all started out making faces in a mirror, and you keep making faces all your life

I don’t think of myself as a character actress – that’s become a phrase which means you’ve had it.

The real actor – like any real artist- has a direct line to the collective heart.

I would take a bad script and a good director any day against a good script and a bad director.

In this business, until you’re known as a monster you’re not a star.

In this rat-race everybody’s guilty till proved innocent!

I was the Marlon Brando of my generation.

I will never be below the title.

I survived because I was tougher than anybody else.

People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.

Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times – almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I’ve seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it.

I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it. Actually it hasn’t been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they’d given me half an Oscar I would have thrown it back in their faces. You see, I’m an Aries. I never lose.

I never did pal around with actresses. Their talk usually bored me to tears.

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don’t remember ever having seen one weep

Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism.

I will not retire while I’ve still got my legs and my make-up box.

Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.

I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn’t dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.

I don’t take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache.

Wave after wave of love flooded the stage and washed over me, the beginning of the one great durable romance of my life.

Bette Davis Quotes on Men and Marriage

Strong women only marry weak men.

When a man gives his opinion he’s a man. When a woman gives her opinion she’s a bitch.

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

I’ve no time for broads who want to rule the world alone. Without men, who’d do up the zipper on the back of your dress?

It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies.

The male ego with few exceptions is elephantine to start with.

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’ve always liked men better than women.

I’d marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he’d be dead within a year.

Other Great Bette Davis Quotes

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

My passions were all gathered together like fingers that made a fist. Drive is considered aggression today; I knew it then as purpose.

You should know me well enough by now to know I don’t ask for things I don’t think I can get

That’s me: an old kazoo with some sparklers.

Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; but now I know it.

There comes a time in every woman’s life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne

To look back is to relax one’s vigil.

I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oftentimes disagreeable… I suppose I’m larger than life

It is my last wish to be buried sitting up.

My darling, it is late and I am very tired of youth, love, and self-sacrifice.  

It’s better to be hated for who you are, than to be loved for someone you’re not. It’s a sign of your worth sometimes, if you’re hated by the right people.

Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child. He needs guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.”

The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone’s concern and like vampires they suck out life’s blood.

I was never very interested in boys – and there were plenty of them – vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay.

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.

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

I work to stay alive.

Sex is God’s joke on human beings.

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.

From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it.

I’d luv to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair.

The only way you can become a legend is in your coffin

Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!

Never, never trust anyone who asks for white wine. It means they’re phonies

Gay Liberation? I ain’t against it, it’s just that there’s nothing in it for me.

You know what I’m going to have on my gravestone? She did it the hard way

I am just too much.

I often think that a slightly exposed shoulder emerging from a long satin nightgown packs more sex than two naked bodies in bed.

I sent my flowers across the hall to Mrs. Nixon but her husband remembered what a Democrat I am and sent them back.

I went back to work because someone had to pay for the groceries.

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