Quotes by Playwrights - Page 146

Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. - Without haste, but without rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Immature poets imitate: mature poets steal.
Philip Massinger
I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.
Ingmar Bergman
Such Polly are your sex - part truth part fiction Some thought much whim and all contradiction.
Richard Savage
Universe is a paradise of beautiful hidden doors.
Mehmet Murat ildan
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
Oscar Wilde
Avoid the man without compassion, because he ain’t a man surely!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Oscar Wilde
Pooh hasn't much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right. There's Owl. Owl hasn't exactly got Brain, but he Knows Things. He would know the Right Thing to Do when Surrounded by Water. There's Rabbit. He hasn't Learnt in Books, but he can always Think of a Clever Plan. There's Kanga. She isn't Clever, Kanga isn't, but she would be so anxious about Roo that she would do a Good Thing to Do without thinking about it. And then there's Eeyore. And Eeyore is so miserable anyhow that he wouldn't mind about this.
A.A. Milne
I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything anything I ever did I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.
Tennessee Williams
What you can do or dream you can do begin it boldness has genius power and magic in it.
Johann von Goethe
The same man cannot be skilled in everything each has his special excellence.
Euripides
And what if I did run my ship aground oh still it was splendid to sail it!
Henrik Ibsen
Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I've written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn't as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking of character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped to the foot.
Alan Bennett
If a thing which is believed by billions is against the reason and not supported by the science, it is a great honour not to be amongst those billions!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.
Honoré de Balzac
We pimp our precious lives to the infernal gnashing babble - Follow me! Friend me! Like me! But don't ever know me.
Patrick Marber
I believe the future is only the past again entered through another gate.
Arthur Wing Pinero
It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
Words of affection howsoe'er expressed The latest spoken still are deem'd the best.
Joanna Baillie
Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover's privilege.
J.M. Barrie
One learns by doing the thing for though you think you know it you have no certainty until you try.
Sophocles
In my mind, Martha, you are buried in cement right up to your neck. No… right up to your nose… that’s much quieter.
Edward Albee
All your life has been a journey to find an identity.
Larry Kramer
It's good to remember…So you know you need to do now,So you know that you ain't got forever just right now,Good to remember death man.
Tarell Alvin McCraney
My double drags his coffin, humble slave,I, at least, am real, though changed to flesh.Far-off, I build me a church no hand can shape("Winter Sonnets: III")
Vyacheslav Ivanov
I am that which unloves me and loves; I am stricken, and I am the blow.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been disturbed. This second group is called the control group. It is the control group which enables the scientist gauge the effect of his experiment. To judge the significance of what has occurred. In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who o not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.
Cormac McCarthy
Men in rage strike those that wish them best.
William Shakespeare
Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.
Bertolt Brecht
One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
Alan Bennett
You may make love in dancing as well as sitting.
Aphra Behn
Nat: Maybe you broke something.Midge: I know. Never fall down, never fall down!Nat: Ah, it's nothing. I fall down every morning. I get up, I have a cup of coffee, I fall down. That's the system. Two years old, you stand up and then BOOM! seventy years later, you fall down again.
Herb Gardner
A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.
George Bernard Shaw
I have often wondered, Sir, [. . .] to observe so few Instances of Charity among Mankind; for tho' the Goodness of a Man's Heart did not incline him to relieve the Distresses of his Fellow-Creatures, methinks the Desire of Honour should move him to it. What inspires a Man to build fine Houses, to purchase fine Furniture, Pictures, Clothes, and other things at a great Expence, but an Ambition to be respected more than other People? Now would not one great Act of Charity, one Instance of redeeming a poor Family from all the Miseries of Poverty, restoring an unfortunate Tradesman by a Sum of Money to the means of procuring a Livelihood by his Industry, discharging an undone Debtor from his Debts or a Goal, or any such Example of Goodness, create a Man more Honour and Respect than he could acquire by the finest House, Furniture, Pictures or Clothes that were ever beheld? For not only the Object himself who was thus relieved, but all who heard the Name of such a Person must, I imagine, reverence him infinitely more than the Possessor of all those other things: which when we so admire, we rather praise the Builder, the Workman, the Painter, the Laceman, the Taylor, and the rest, by whose Ingenuity they are produced, than the Person who by his Money makes them his own.
Henry Fielding
With the same habit of mind, even if you live thousands of lives, all will be the same! Get a different habit of mind to get a different life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
Sinclair Lewis
Simple things have greater power than the complicated things!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.
Oscar Wilde
Souls are more important than stories, yes. But stories are a window to the soul. Without stories, the soul suffocates.
Christy Hall
Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.
Friedrich Schiller
[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.
Samuel Beckett
Every seed wants to die in the soil! Every umbrella wants to live in a perpetually rainy world! Every mirror wants to see its own face in another mirror! Everything in this universe has dreams they wish to realise!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Double face in a person is no problem as long as both faces are more or less the same!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Life... is a paradise to what we fear of death.
William Shakespeare
In a country where even humans are treated brutally, animals must be in a totally desperate condition!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A peevish self-willed harlotry it is.*She’s a stubborn little brat.*
William Shakespeare
When the law is wrong it's because it's unnatural, but in this case it is natural and a river will drown you if you buck it now
Arthur Miller
Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
Eugène Ionesco
What do we feel when we look at a good photograph? We just want to be there, right at the exact moment that photo taken!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you do.
George Bernard Shaw
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
William Saroyan
I tried to think outside the box but couldn't open the lid.
Alan Dapre
But where do you live mostly now?"With the lost boys."Who are they?"They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I'm captain."What fun it must be!"Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship."Are none of the others girls?"Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.
J.M. Barrie
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man'sto keep unmarried as long as he can.
George Bernard Shaw
I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.
August Strindberg
He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.
Robertson Davies
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
Sinclair Lewis
An endless path is frightening but the path that ends is even more frightening!
Mehmet Murat ildan