Quotes by Playwrights - Page 57

You can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.
A.A. Milne
Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted: and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly, I love none. Beatrice: A dear happiness to women: they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me. -Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare
As soon as you trust yourself you will know how to live.
Johann von Goethe
Heav'n has no rage like love to hatred turn'd Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorn'd.
William Congreve
Powerful words always travel the whole world!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You are never too old to become younger!
Mae West
The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.
Oscar Wilde
Dear Miss Pomeroy, I am saddened by the things I do not know. There are hundreds--thousands--of books in the world and I will never be able to read all of them.I am old.Walter
Barbara Wersba
We will freedom for freedom’s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Mechanism! Everywhere -- mechanism! Devices for getting away from life so complete that there seemed no life to get away from.
John Galsworthy
Living with contradiction may be nothing new to humans, but acknowledging it, and accepting it are. Even the dictionary has trouble accepting a paradox, calling it 'two things that seem to be contradictory but may possibly be true.' But that's not a real paradox--a real paradox IS contradictory and IS true. So I don't even call them paradoxes anymore, I call them 'contradictory co-existing realities,' both in direct opposition to each other, both true at the same time.
Shellen Lubin
On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it, so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment.
W Somerset Maugham
We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.
T.S Eliot
The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, which still we thank as love.
William Shakespeare
I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
Honoré de Balzac
She moves me not, or not removes at least affection's edge in me.
William Shakespeare
The chief beauty about timeis that you cannot waste it in advance.The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you,as perfect, as unspoiled,as if you had never wasted or misapplieda single moment in all your life.You can turn over a new leaf every hourif you choose.
Arnold Bennett
And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.
William Shakespeare
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.
Oscar Wilde
I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring.
Dodie Smith
This the kind of world, if you don’t die, you just keep on growing up and living through everything that comes.
J. California Cooper
There's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful
Sarah Kane
I never thrust my nose into other men's porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine: Every man for himself and God for us all.
Miguel de Cervantes
You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction, of duty, charity, and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wonders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.
W Somerset Maugham
Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore. It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit, like Galileo’s finger in the church of Santa Croce, but Edison’s last breath is an invisible relic.
Elizabeth Alexander
When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.
Jeff Lindsay
One's lifework I have learned grows with the working and the living. Do it as if your life depended on it and first thing you know you'll have made a life out of it. A good life too
Theresa Helburn
*to thor* Zeus had replied that he had pulled fluffballs of lint out of his bellybutton that were bigger than Asgard
Eoin Colfer
A translation is no translation,’ he said, ‘unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
John Millington Synge
Visit your life, because you are spending too much time in others life! Visit yourself!
Mehmet Murat ildan
They killed him because he was too innocent to live.
Graham Greene
What day is it?"It's today," squeaked Piglet.My favorite day," said Pooh.
A.A. Milne
Rather throw away that which is dearest to you your own life than turn away a good friend.
Sophocles
Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.
Emma Donoghue
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no nor woman neidier though by your smiling you seem to say so.
William Shakespeare
A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser.
William Shakespeare
Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and pu the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, head, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.
Cormac McCarthy
Thwackum was for doing justice and leaving mercy to heaven.
Henry Fielding
He who is plenteously provided for from within needs but little from without.
Johann von Goethe
Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would noteIn me a beauty that was never mine,How first you knew me in a book I wrote,How first you loved me for a written line....
Edna St. Vincent Millay
A beautiful poem is like a beautiful sky and a beautiful sky is like a beautiful poem!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Thou art a very ragged Wart.
William Shakespeare
Man is a tireless traveller wandering in the dark valleys of his past!
Mehmet Murat ildan
And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.
Honoré de Balzac
When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Reverend Harper: Have you ever tried to persuade him that he wasn't Teddy Roosevelt?Abby Brewster: Oh, no.Martha Brewster: Oh, he's so happy being Teddy Roosevelt.Abby Brewster: Oh... Do you remember, Martha, once, a long time ago, we thought if he'd be George Washington, it might be a change for him, and we suggested it.Martha Brewster: And do you know what happened? He just stayed under his bed for days and wouldn't be anybody.
Joseph Kesselring
In misery it is great comfort to have a companion.
John Lyly
O! Learn to read what silent love hath writ:to hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.
William Shakespeare
You can't live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need to. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions.
Henning Mankell
You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarrassing people in the world for they continually remind you of inequities which we accept as the proper thing. The sight of an ancient woman, gasping and wheezing as she drags a heavy pail of water down a hotel corridor to mop up the mess of some drunken overprivileged guest, is one that sickens and weighs upon the heart and withers it with shame for this world in which it is not only tolerated but regarded as proof positive that the wheels of Democracy are functioning as they should without interference from above or below. Nobody should have to clean up anybody else’s mess in this world. It is terribly bad for both parties, but probably worse for the one receiving the service.
Tennessee Williams
The attention was flattering. For the first five minutes. Now I know how poems feel.
Margaret Edson
It's a blindness thing, faith.
Niall Williams
One gives way to the temptation, only to rise from it again, afterwards, with a great eagerness to reestablish one's dignity, as if it were a tombstone to place on the grave of one's shame, and a monument to hide and sign the memory of our weaknesses. Everybody's in the same case. Some folks haven't the courage to say certain things, that's all!THE STEP-DAUGHTER: All appear to have the courage to do them though.
Luigi Pirandello
Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me.
Samuel Beckett
Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress.
Anton Chekhov
That man is happiest who lives from day to day and asks no more garnering the simple goodness of a life.
Euripides
We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck and ask anyone the house is never burgled and the ship never goes down.
Jean Anouilh
Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, “I know how to add two numbers, but I’m not going to tell you.” And they laugh and shout, “No!” That’s so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing — what does that remind you of? Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results? Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,and is based not on gain and fame, but on love.
Margaret Edson
All things that we ordained festival,Turn from their office to black funeral;Our instruments to melancholy bells,Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast,Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change,Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,And all things change them to the contrary.
William Shakespeare
The candle glimmers but an hour. The nightLooms in its ancient hunger. Would you knowThe tragedy of human love and need?Gaze on the stars, then on a brother's face!
George Sterling