Quotes by Playwrights - Page 172

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
We live in a crowded and stifling world, my dear sir; just to be able to walk, we have to push and shove others willy nilly!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What the hell difference does it make left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.
Brendan Behan
Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.
Tony Kushner
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
Molière
He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices.
Carlo Goldoni
These days only a guerrilla or a box man would want to cover up his identity to the extent of refusing the convenience of instalment buying. But I am that box man. A representative of anti-instalmentism.
Kōbō Abe
And if I loved you Wednesday well what is that to you? I do not love you Thursday - so much is true.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time.
J.M. Barrie
The nobility of England would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount. But you'll labor like scholars over a bulldog's pedigree.
Robert Bolt
That's what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.
Emma Donoghue
As in this world there are degrees of evils, So in this world there are degrees of devils.
John Webster
Of course I saved you," she said. "I couldn't do without you." And because she was happy and flushed with magic, Holly leaned down and kissed Artemis, magic sparking around the contact like tiny fireworks.
Eoin Colfer
What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.
William Shakespeare
My noble father,I do perceive here a divided duty.To you I am bound for life and education.My life and education both do learn meHow to respect you. You are the lord of my duty,I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband,And so much duty as my mother showedTo you, preferring you before her father,So much I challenge that I may professDue to the Moor my lord.
William Shakespeare
Sadness in autumn is an autumn within autumn!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What did it all mean? He thought of his own life, the high hopes with which he had entered upon it, the limitations which his body forced upon him, his friendlessness, and the lack of affection which had surrounded his youth. He did not know that he had ever done anything but what seemed best to do, and what a cropper he had come! Other men, with no more advantages than he, succeeded, and others again, with many more, failed. It seemed pure chance. The rain fell alike upon the just and upon the unjust, and for nothing was there a why and a wherefore.
W Somerset Maugham
However imperfect our conception of virtue, still let us cling to it; for a moment’s forgetfulness exposes us to all the malignant forces from without. The simplest lie to myself, buried though it may be in the silence of my soul, may yet be as dangerous to my inner liberty as an act of treachery on the marketplace. Widfom and Destiny
Maurice Maeterlinck
We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.
Sophocles
Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.
William Shakespeare
I work as my father drank.
George Bernard Shaw
Give me that man That is not passion's slave.
William Shakespeare
The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.
George Bernard Shaw
Lysistrata: Oh, Calonicé, my heart is on fire; I blush for our sex. Men will have it we are tricky and sly...Calonicé: And they are quite right, upon my word!Lysistrata: Yet, look you, when the women are summoned to meet for a matter of the last importance, they lie abed instead of coming.Calonicé: Oh, they will come, my dear; but 'tis not easy you know, for a woman to leave the house. One is busy pottering about her husband; another is getting the servant up; a third is putting her child asleep or washing the brat or feeding it.
Aristophanes
You don't bless what you love...It's when you want to love and you can't manage it. You stretch out your hands and you say God forgive me that I can't love but bless this thing anyway...We have to bless what we hate...It would be better to love, but that's not always possible.
Graham Greene
Your world may think what it chooses...but really, opinion and gossip count for nothing at all against truth...
Susan Hill
You cannot have too many aconites. They cost, as I said before, about fifty shillings a thousand. A thousand will make a brave splash of colour, which lasts a month. If you can afford ten thousand, you are mad not to buy them. There are so many exciting places you can put them. . . in the hollow of a felled tree, by the border of a pond, in a circle round a statue, or immediately under your window, so that you can press your nose against the glass, when it is too cold to go out, and stare at them, and remember that spring is on its way.
Beverley Nichols
Every right quote is a golden stair to enlightenment!
Mehmet Murat ildan
O ill-starred wench! Pale as your smock!
William Shakespeare
Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.
Maurice Maeterlinck
In reality the concept of ‘other nation’ is wrong because there is only one nation: The Human Nation!
Mehmet Murat ildan
O, how this spring of love resemblethThe uncertain glory of an April day,Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,And by and by a cloud takes all away!
William Shakespeare
To read is to climb the high places!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.
Hélène Cixous
Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.
Euripides
...everyone goes home in the end.
Emma Donoghue
In the old age black was not counted fair,Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name.But now is black beauty’s successive heir,And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.For since each hand hath put on nature’s pow'r,Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face,Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bow'r,But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seemAt such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,Sland'ring creation with a false esteem.  Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,  That every tongue says beauty should look so.
William Shakespeare
Art symbolizes our perfect ability in the matter of enriching the reality!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.
Graham Greene
The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.
Catherine Crowe
Fight on my merry men all I'm a little wounded but I am not slain I will lay me down for to bleed a while Then I'll rise and fight with you again.
John Dryden
He began to realize what the criminal class knows so well, the impossibility of explaining anything to a man with power.
Graham Greene
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
Oscar Wilde
Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ.
William Shakespeare
Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?
Jeff Lindsay
I see it on his face. I hear it when he talks. We look out at the world and we see the same thing: Not Fair. And the only difference between us is Ricky's out there trying to get even. And he knows not trust anybody and he got it straight from me. And he knows not to try and get work, and guess where he got that. He walks around like there's loose boards in the floor, and you know who laid that floor, I did.
Marsha Norman
You are aware of only one unrest;Oh, never learn to know the other!Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,And one is striving to forsake its brother.Unto the world in grossly loving zest,With clinging tendrils, one adheres;The other rises forcibly in questOf rarefied ancestral spheres.If there be spirits in the airThat hold their sway between the earth and sky,Descend out of the golden vapors thereAnd sweep me into iridescent life.Oh, came a magic cloak into my handsTo carry me to distant lands,I should not trade it for the choicest gown,Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you live at the same time as great contemporaries, you become a flower getting rain live.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Let your walk be wisely so that you can inspire others to walk wisely!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I keep seeing this ad on TV. It talks about teachers. Thank you for teaching me. Thank you for changing my life. They all look happy. Have they always been this happy? Did they have a perfect childhood? A perfect school life? I was happy once. But I was young. The older you get, the more you remember. The younger you are, the more you forget.
Haresh Sharma
At this point, the jealousy that tortured me all my life commenced, and the force with which it came over me marked me forever. It became my true passion, utterly heedless of any attempts at convincing me or pointing out a better way.
Elias Canetti
A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
George Bernard Shaw
Every end of every day is the most important time of that day because you confront with your past and you obtain a chance for tomorrow not to repeat your past mistakes!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.
Antonin Artaud
This gentleman evidently belonged to the category of those people who wish the Government to interfere in everything, even in their daily quarrels with their wives.
Nikolai Gogol
I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.
Gertrude Stein
A society with lynch culture needs a big zoo, not for the animals definitely, but for the very people themselves!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is more important to prove something to yourself than to prove it to others!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples.
J.M. Barrie