Don Corleone Quotes

He smelled the garden, the yellow shield of light smote his eyes, and he whispered, "Life is so beautiful."
...
Yes, he thought, if I can die saying, "Life is so beautiful," then nothing else is important. ~ Mario Puzo

Brando said he'd noticed that powerful people spoke quietly, and Don Corleone's quiet calm and nearly inaudible speaking voice are key to the character. When Corleone speaks, you have to be quiet to hear him. What can we learn from Don Corleone (that doesn't involve killing people)? That quiet does have its own power, if we harness it. ~ Sophia Dembling

He had no illusions about the dangerousness of his mission. He spent the first year meeting with different chiefs of gangs in New York, laying the groundwork, sounding them out, proposing spheres of influence that would be honored by a loosely bound confederated council. But there were too many factions, too many special interests that conflicted. Agreement was impossible. Like other great rulers and lawgivers in history Don Corleone decided that order and peace were impossible until the number of reigning states had been reduced to a manageable number. ~ Mario Puzo

Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendship you wouldn't have to ask me to help. - Don Corleone ~ Mario Puzo

The other Dons in the room applauded and rose to shake hands with everybody in sight and to congratulate Don Corleone and Don Tattaglia on their new friendship. It was not perhaps the warmest friendship in the world, they would not send each other Christmas gift greetings, but they would not murder each other. That was friendship enough in this world, all that was needed. ~ Mario Puzo

So Don Corleone himself was not angry. He had long ago learned that society imposes insults that must be borne, comforted by the knowledge that in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful. It was this knowledge that ~ Mario Puzo

Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than the government. It is almost the equal of family.- Don Corleone ~ Mario Puzo

Wasn't it true that Sometimes the greatest misfortunes brought unforseen rewards? -Don Corleone ~ Mario Puzo

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now. ~ Don DeLillo

To be alive is to totally and openly participate in the simplicity and elegance of here and now. ~ Don Altman

I've never gambled a dime. Never, in all my years in Vegas. ~ Don Rickles

Every writer is working from his own individual world view, and that can become as characteristic as a fingerprint. ~ Don Pendleton

A better-constituted boy would certainly have profited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus; and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were. As it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance of whatever was taught me, with the worst Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical academy. I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill." I had no desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles and bathing the bright green water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know why it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very beautiful. ("The Lifted Veil") ~ George Eliot

Don't talk to me."
"Why not?"
"Because I want to fix that in my memory for ever. Draco Malfoy, the amazing bouncing ferret ... ~ J.K. Rowling

I spent so many years just saying what I felt without thinking about the ramifications, without understanding that I have this opinion but not everyone might share that opinion and now they don't like me because of it. ~ Katherine Heigl

If you look at the heritage of the best advertising, you can make stuff that is great for both readers and advertisers. I don't think Don Draper would have loved banner ads. ~ Jonah Peretti

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. ~ Joseph Campbell

I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men. ~ Mario Puzo

We live in a world where people are so busy trying to find someone that's "good enough" for them, that they have failed to stop and ask themselves if they are in fact good enough for other people! This is the result of a feeling of false entitlement that has been instilled in the minds of people today. "Everyone" deserves "the best" from the "Universe" however, nobody is teaching anybody to stop and try to become the best for their own selves and for other people. When everybody thinks they are the best, everybody falls short of the best that they can actually be. ~ C. JoyBell C.

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail. (148) ~ Don DeLillo

John McEnroe ... was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived-the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad. ~ David Foster Wallace

What you believe might be wrong; what you don't believe might be right! Don't be sure of things! Doubt! Investigate! Leave your stupid conceit that your belief is an absolute truth! Open your mind to all the possibilities! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Sir Falwick," said Geralt, not ceasing to smile. "If he draws his sword, I'll take it from him and beat the snotty-nosed little brat's arse with the flat of his blade. And then I'll batter the door down with him. ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind. ~ Don Marquis

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world. ~ Don DeLillo

I can't believe what I said about myself. What I said in my own private conversations with myself to an ESPN producer are my business, and I had no business saying them to someone else. ~ Don King

Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted. ~ Don DeLillo

I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't you feel even worse. ~ J.D. Salinger

To be successful in a knowledge economy firms need to create learning organizations. ~ Don Tapscott

With the motto "do what you will," Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau's Alector, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda's Justina, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville's Fantastic Tales, Sorel's Francion, Burton's Anatomy, Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Amory's John Buncle, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett's Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann's Tomcat Murr, Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey's Doctor, Melville's Moby-Dick, Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe's ornate novels, Bely's Petersburg, Joyce's Ulysses, Witkiewicz's Polish jokes, Flann O'Brien's Irish farces, Philip Wylie's Finnley Wren, Patchen's tender novels, Burroughs's and Kerouac's mad ones, Nabokov's later works, Schmidt's fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard's later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palin ~ Steven Moore

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton. ~ Don Roff

I have often said one of the reasons more blacks don't support Republicans is because they don't trust the GOP establishment. ~ J. C. Watts

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech. ~ Nora Ephron

Don't wait longer. It is always the right time for the right action. ~ Debasish Mridha

I don't think there should be a Palestinian state because I don't believe in states. ~ Elia Suleiman

I don't believe in God ... I hope he doesn't hold that against me. ~ Rick Reynolds

You just can't keep pouring money down an endless hole and never recoup any of it. It's got to be a business. ~ Don Bluth

Excuses are the nails that are used to build the house of failure. ~ Don Wilder