Quotes by Playwrights - Page 2

Knowing is not enough we must apply. Willing is not enough we must do.
Johann von Goethe
To make the State your god is to worship an idol, for the State is a man-made creation arising naturally out of tribal communion; but the soul, if such there be, is a god-made miracle and above all national or patriotic standards – the supreme and eternal reality.
Eden Phillpotts
...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
Brian Friel
Hand holding sword is always an ugly hand!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.
Niall Williams
I am the spirit that negates.And rightly so, for all that comes to beDeserves to perish wretchedly;'Twere better nothing would begin.Thus everything that that your terms, sin,Destruction, evil represent—That is my proper element.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
God is forgotten, the mighty dollar has taken his place and the mechanic cannot ease the troubled soul. The road is closed. Under circumstances such as these America only increases speed. America will not stop for anything, it wants to get on, go on, forge a way ahead. Should America turn back? Absolutely not! It simply increases the pace a hundredfold, acts the hurricane and whips life up to a white heat. In Europe nowadays we have the word Americanism, the old days had festina lente.
Knut Hamsun
Every man has a river on his mind: The River of Thoughts! But not every man has a holy river on his mind: The River of Right Thoughts!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Who with the Devil tries to play fair,weaves the net of his own despair.Oh, smile; what’s a house between drunkards?
Derek Walcott
They will conquer but they will not convince.
Miguel de Unamuno
If you have carefully examined hundred people you met in your life journey, it means that you have read hundred different books! Every person you know is a book; world is full of walking books; some are boring, some are marvellous, some are weak, some are powerful, but they are all useful because they all carry different experiences of different paths!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W Somerset Maugham
Do you want to give a special gift in the New Year to someone you love? Then let him or her realize this: We are the main shepherd of our fate, we are the main designer of our destiny!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.
Betty Smith
No one is happy all his life long.
Euripides
Even as I'm shoveling up my hooter, I realize the sad truth. Coke bores me, It bores us all. We're jaded cunts, in a scene we hate, a city we hate, pretending that we're at the center of the universe, trashing ourselves with crap drugs to stave off the feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, aware that all we're doing is feeding that paranoia and disenchantment, yet somehow we're too apathetic to stop. Cause, sadly, there's nothing else of interest to stop for.
Irvine Welsh
Traveler! If you keep wandering in the path of wisdom you too eventually become a man of wisdom!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If there is no justice in a country, who can claim that, that country is a country? An injustice country is just a rubbish bin!
Mehmet Murat ildan
No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow.
Euripides
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.
Gertrude Stein
Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.
William Shakespeare
It is hard for us to imagine now, but our earliest human ancestors who ventured out onto the grasslands of East Africa some six million years ago were remarkably weak and vulnerable creatures. They stood less than five feet tall. They walked upright and could run on their two legs, but nowhere near as fast as the swift predators on four legs that pursued them. They were skinny—their arms could not provide much defense. They had no claws or fangs or poison to resort to if under attack. To gather fruits, nuts, and insects, or to scavenge dead meat, they had to move out into the open savanna where they became easy prey to leopards or packs of hyenas. So weak and small in number, they might have easily become extinct.And yet within the space of a few million years (remarkably short on the time scale of evolution), these rather physically unimpressive ancestors of ours transformed themselves into the most formidable hunters on the planet. What could possibly account for such a miraculous turnaround?
Robert Greene
Your success in the job market has nothing to do with the job market itself - instead it has everything to do with you.
Simon Gray
Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.
Oscar Wilde
I never loved another person the way I loved myself.
Mae West
The word "Christian" means 'like Christ'! We are to reflect His beauty, do His deeds, think His thoughts, and speak His words. This is what it means to become conformed into the image of Jesus Christ. Do we really understand to what we are committing ourselves when we sing the song 'To be like Jesus...All I ask, to be like Him'? Actually, we are asking for everything that Jesus is: His character, His work, His mind, His word, His beauty, power, wisdom, and will. This is a big order, but it is our destiny! This is what life is all about. To miss this is to miss everything. To gain this is to possess the answer to life's biggest question. Christ is the answer! God planned it so. The will of God the Father for you centers in His Son!
Robert C. Frost
No.'It's not a bad word. And it is very important to use at times. Practice saying it in the mirror. It's empowering.
Christy Hall
Paris, however―because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements―Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.
Jean Cocteau
People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.
Tom Stoppard
Growing up, I used to climb out my window onto the roof and look up at the stars. There, in the quiet, I would write stories inside my head.
Christy Hall
I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:
Oscar Wilde
Blow wind and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow!
William Shakespeare
The moment when kite becomes free, it will fall down!
Mehmet Murat ildan
So in the Libyan fable it is told That once an eagle stricken with a dart Said when he saw the fashion of the shaft 'With our own feathers not by others' hands Are we now smitten.'
Aeschylus
Women who live their lives according to the suffocating religious rules created by men represent one of the saddest tragedies of the whole human history!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I have always been obsessed with naming things. If I could name them, I could tame them. They could be my friends.
Eve Ensler
Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.
Kathy Acker
Meg and Belch only had eyes for each other. Not in the usual romantic sense.
Eoin Colfer
Every man in the world is better than someolne else and not as good as someone else.
William Saroyan
Then indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting over lost days. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A little space of time before time expires a little way of breath.
Algernon Swinburne
How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood When fond recollection presents them to view.
Samuel Woodworth
When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven't said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I've made for myself that I don't follow--I see that I've done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I.
Sheila Heti
I tend the mobile nowlike an injured birdWe text, text, textour significant words.I re-read your first,your second, your third,look for your small xx,feeling absurd.The codes we sendarrive with a broken chord.I try to picture your hands,their image is blurred.Nothing my thumbs presswill ever be heard."Text
Carol Ann Duffy
GLOUCESTERNow, good sir, what are you?EDGARA most poor man made tame to fortune's blows,Who by the art of known and feeling sorrowsAm pregnant to good pity.
William Shakespeare
Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.
Cormac McCarthy
Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.
Maxim Gorky
Get you gone, you dwarf,You minimus of hindering knotgrass made,You bead, you acorn!
William Shakespeare
A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her . . . but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.
W Somerset Maugham
A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.
Tobsha Learner
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
Oscar Wilde
I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world.
Tennessee Williams
Dispute not with her: she is lunatic.
William Shakespeare
If you are happy with your present time, you will look at your past with happy eyes even if you have had a sad past!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
Oscar Wilde
When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." (III,ii, 371-380)
William Shakespeare
Fit to govern? No, not fit to live.
William Shakespeare
When I look at myself in the mirror, I wonder where everything has gone. Even the things I used to remember with so much clarity now seem dimmer. What happens to memory when it vanishes? What happens to events when everyone who remembers them ceases to remember?
Dean Francis Alfar
Each one sees what he carries in his heart.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe