Quotes by Playwrights - Page 47

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde
Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall.
Oliver Goldsmith
Not only persons lose their way, but nations lose their way as well!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.
Kenneth Koch
She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.
Oscar Wilde
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
Oscar Wilde
You can have your secret as long as I have your heart[.]
Oscar Wilde
Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
Oscar Wilde
If a religion wants you to give up your freedom, just give up that religion! Nothing is holier than your freedom!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The sad thing was in the knowing that all their nerve would get them nowhere in the world and that they were lost as all the people in Brooklyn seem lost when the day is nearly over and even though the sun is still bright, it is thin and doesn’t give you warmth when it shines on you.
Betty Smith
I am writing this on a computer that I can’t imagine living without. This is an alarming thought, the extent to which I have organised my life around a metal box full of wires (and, via the Internet, to many other metal boxes full of wires). Someone told me most of the Internet is stored in a warehouse somewhere in North Carolina. I don’t know enough about technology to gauge if this is true, but it made me realise how little I actually understand about the world I inhabit. The world of Dr Wong’s childhood was significantly smaller than mine, but he understood every square inch of it.
Jeremy Tiang
What we look for does not come to pass. God finds a way for what none foresaw.
Euripides
The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.
Howard Zinn
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
George Bernard Shaw
A limited mind will have a limited world!
Mehmet Murat ildan
OppressionNow dreamsAre not availableTo the dreamers,Nor songsTo the singers.In some landsDark nightAnd cold steelPrevail--But the dreamWill come back,And the songBreakIts jail.
Langston Hughes
For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.
Anton Chekhov
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation.
Thornton Wilder
Pleasure and revenge have ears more deaf than adders to the voice of any true decision.
William Shakespeare
...[T]here are days when emptiness is spacious, and non-existence elevating.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
Viola to Duke Orsino: 'I'll do my bestt t To woo your lady.'[Aside.] 'Yet, a barful strife!t t Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife.
William Shakespeare
Okay baby, let's take this rocket to Uranus. This hoor is perfect, and she can act as well.
Irvine Welsh
In low intelligent ignorant societies, the clever are denigrated and the stupid are belauded; the brainy are stoned and the dull are held in high esteem!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Sun always shines for those who have something good to stand upon.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Disappointment means that things haven’t worked out the way you wanted! And now what to do? Very simple: Stand up and walk! Cut the tragedy because our limited time must always be used for the forward movements!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.
Cormac McCarthy
There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.
Cormac McCarthy
The chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin was evil and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvelous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous.
Joseph Heller
She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.
Thornton Wilder
The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!
Richard Greenberg
In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.
Elizabeth Alexander
You have to cross many bridges and you have to walk many paths in your life! But what is more important than this is to know which bridges you should not cross and which paths you must not walk!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When I consider life, 't is all a cheat.Yet fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay.To-morrow 's falser than the former day;Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possest.Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;And from the dregs of life think to receiveWhat the first sprightly running could not give.
John Dryden
Good madonna, give me leave toprove you a fool.
William Shakespeare
Every one can master a grief but he that has it.
William Shakespeare
It was not for the piano-tuner to know that in this still, grey, winter-gripped dining-room, this apparent mortuary of desire and passion (in which the lift rumbled and knives and forks scraped upon plates), waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred!
Patrick Hamilton
No one can be so welcome a guest that he will not annoy his host after three days.
Plautus
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Robertson Davies
I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.
George Bernard Shaw
She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!
W Somerset Maugham
Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.
Thornton Wilder
The burden of a porter is temporary, but the burden of a crooked politician is permanent because his conscience always carry the enormous burden of his frauds!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Do not grieve so much for a husband lost that it wastes away your life.
Euripides
Move on. Be well. Go for it!
Sally Stubbs
Then of thy beauty do I question make,That thou among the wastes of time must go,Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,And die as fast as they see others grow.
William Shakespeare
When love is not madness it is not love.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
ROSENCRANTZ My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king.HAMLET The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing -GUILDENSTERN A thing my lord?HAMLET Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after!
William Shakespeare
This was the most unkindest cut of all For when the noble Caesar saw him stab Ingratitude more strong than traitor's arm Quite vanquish'd him then burst his mighty heart.
William Shakespeare
Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on end. It rarely happens that our attention is not stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal element.
Samuel Beckett
Jimmy: One day, when I'm no longer spending my days running a sweet-stall, I may write a book about us all. It's all here. (slapping his forehead) Written in flames a mile high. And it won't be recollected in tranquillity either, picking daffodils with Auntie Wordsworth. It'll be recollected in fire, and blood. My blood.
John Osborne
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
You either keep your childhood innocence or you rot!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Beauty is more a danger than intelligence or wit. One becomes a living mirror for the inadequacies of others.
Gordon Dahlquist
Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.
Thornton Wilder
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
Oscar Wilde
God grant us patience!
William Shakespeare
Jesters do often prove prophets.
William Shakespeare
To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Seamus Heaney
Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politics stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.
Peter Morgan
Bondage And Service - that was what they all demanded and from everyone. This craving to find themselves in another, to subjugate and appropriate foreign territory, to create a new field for their own will in a second body, foreign flesh for their own soul; this greedy, consuming hunger devoured every other desire, and they called it friendship!
Hermann Bahr