Elaine May Quotes

The balance between confidence and humility is best learned through extensive experience and mistakes.

Seriously I suspected I was a good actor, though I didn't know it during 'Monsoon Wedding.' Now I realize the more I learn, the less I know about acting... and life.

The taste of defeat has a richness of experience all its own.

It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.

Sometimes painful things can teach us lessons that we didn't think we needed to know.

We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

If you think that you did everything and know everything and that everything has been done perfectly well, then it's time to retire.

I think failing is the best way to keep you grounded, curious, and humble. Success is dangerous because often you don't understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you've failed. You have a lot of time to think about it.

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all

You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I.

Understand that you don't know it all. You don't know anything yet. What you've been taught is great, but always go with common sense. And don't marry your first love.

If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing.

I should hate to think that the Senate was as tired of me at the beginning of my service as I am of the Senate at the end.

We cannot all be masters.

Sometimes it takes failure to figure out who you aren't.

The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.

I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway?

Experience is something I always think I have until I get more of it.

Love is not everything ... It is only when we are young that we think it is.

but if I've learned anything, it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.

No matter what one does, regardless of failure or success, the experience is a form of success in itself.

I never learned a thing from a tournament I won.

I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them.

I'll never know - I'll never profess to know - anything anywhere near it all. It'sall a journey - life, work, and relationships. Mistakes and learning, and learning not to make your mistakes again.