Barbara Walters quotes: well-known American journalist and TV personality, Barbara Walters offers her thoughts on money, success, faith, family, and more.
“One may walk over the highest mountain one step at a time.”
“To excel is to reach your own highest dream. But you must also help others, where and when you can, to reach theirs. Personal gain is empty if you do not feel you have positively touched another’s life.”
“Work harder than everybody. You’re not going to get it by whining, and you’re not going to get it by shouting, and you’re not going to get it by quitting. You’re going to get it by being there.”
“The hardest thing you will ever do is trust yourself.”
“What I feel more and more is how important it is to live your life in a better way, and not to worry about it. What happens will happen.”
“Success can make you go one of two ways. It can make you a prima donna… or it can smooth the edges, take away the insecurities, let the nice things come out.”
“Life sometimes brings enormous difficulties and challenges that seem just too hard to bear. But bear them you can, and bear them you will, and your life can have a purpose.”
“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
“You will have some failure. And you will be able to go on, add a new chapter, and have a more interesting time.”
“A job is not a career. I think I started out with a job. It turned into a career and changed my life.”
“Just do your job. Get in early. Stay late, and don’t complain. Fight the big fights.”
“Don’t worry about finding your bliss right now. Not even our President knew what his bliss was, nor did I. One of these days to your own surprise, your bliss will find you. But no matter what you do, participate, be there, full-force, full heart, full steam ahead.”
“When you’re interviewing someone, you’re in control. When you’re being interviewed, you think you’re in control, but you’re not.”
“A good laugh makes any interview, or any conversation, so much better.”
“Wait for those unguarded moments. Relax the mood and, like the child dropping off to sleep, the subject often reveals his truest self.”
“Show me someone who never gossips, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t interested in people.”
“To feel valued, to know, even if only once in a while, that you can do a job well, is an absolutely marvelous feeling.”
“A man cannot be comfortable or cannot be made comfortable without his own approval.”
“I find very often people like to confront rumors. It depends on how much they trust you. And you have to have a line between what is tasteful and what isn’t.”
“Don’t confuse being stimulating with being blunt.”
“A conversation isn’t a competition.”
“It’s a fact that it is much more comfortable to be in the position of the person who has been offended than to be the unfortunate cause of it.”
“It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion, and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.”
“Large cocktail parties are an infamous technique for ridding yourself of social obligations to people you usually don’t know well or like much, which is such an unpromising beginning that I’ve rarely known one that recovered and turned into a great party.”
“Deep breaths are very helpful at shallow parties.”
“The way you dress is the billboard that tells perceptive people how you feel about yourself.”
“I didn’t get ahead by sleeping with people. Girls, take heart!”
“I was the kind nobody thought could make it. I had a funny Boston accent. I couldn’t pronounce my R’s. I wasn’t a beauty.”
“I was a total flop. But the best thing that happened to me was that I had to work my way back.”
“I knew that it wasn’t just luck and I wasn’t just at the right place at the right time. I proved it to myself. It gave me the proof that I never had.”
“This is what I tell, especially young women, fight the big fights. Don’t fight the little fight. Be the first one in, be the last one out. Do your homework, choose your battles. Don’t whine, and don’t be the one who complains about everything. Fight the big fight.”
“Most of us have trouble juggling. The woman who says she doesn’t is someone whom I admire but have never met.”
“A woman can do anything. She can be traditionally feminine and that’s all right; she can work; she can stay at home; she can be aggressive; she can be passive; she can be any way she wants with a man. But whenever there are the kinds of choices there are today, unless you have some solid base, life can be frightening.”
“I have affected the way women are regarded, and that’s important to me.”
“I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me when some smaller, young woman comes up to me and tells me of her achievements. That’s my legacy.”
“Children are God’s way of punishing us for having sex.”
“Being a parent is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love, you can get a puppy.”
“When your child is in trouble, the first thing you do is blame yourself.”
“Parents of young children should realize that few people, and maybe no one, will find their children as enchanting as they do.”
“Before we had airplanes and astronauts, we really thought that there was an actual place beyond the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow. There was an actual place, and we could go above the clouds and find it there.”
“I also found that for myself, since I’ve had no religious education, it was so interesting to see the different versions of heaven and what life on earth means.”
“The need to believe that there’s a better, safer place like heaven is almost universal.”
“To not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice, which I’ve done all my life, and not to be able to phrase lyrics and give people that kind of joy, I think I would be totally devastated.”
“Whatever hand you are dealt, I hope you will find the game worthwhile. I do. And rarely have I been happier with the hand that I have been dealt than I am today.”
“It has been an absolutely joyful, rewarding, challenging, fascinating, and occasionally bumpy ride and I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“A hot fudge sundae and a trashy novel is my idea of heaven.”
“On being indecisive and changeable – on my gravestone I want inscribed: ‘On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.'”
“And I really do believe that the most important thing is the way you live your life on earth. But I think it’s enormously comforting to believe that you’re going to see your loved ones.”
“Every genius I have met could be classified as crazy by most people. They possess the highest level of sanity that us people find difficult to understand and accept.”
