Quotes by Playwrights - Page 92

The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
William Saroyan
When something is Festering on your memory or in your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant...
Tennessee Williams
I'll fares the land to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates and men decay Princes and Lords may flourish or may fade - A breath can make them as a breath has made - But a bold peasantry their country's pride When once destroy'd can never be supplied.
Oliver Goldsmith
Wonder of time,' quoth she, 'this is my spite,That, thou being dead, the day should yet be light.'Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy:Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend:It shall be waited on with jealousy,Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end,Ne'er settled equally, but high or low,That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.'It shall be fickle, false and full of fraud,Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while;The bottom poison, and the top o'erstraw'dWith sweets that shall the truest sight beguile:The strongest body shall it make most weak,Strike the wise dumb and teach the fool to speak.'It shall be sparing and too full of riot,Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet,Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures;It shall be raging-mad and silly-mild,Make the young old, the old become a child.'It shall suspect where is no cause of fear;It shall not fear where it should most mistrust;It shall be merciful and too severe,And most deceiving when it seems most just;Perverse it shall be where it shows most toward,Put fear to valour, courage to the coward.'It shall be cause of war and dire events,And set dissension 'twixt the son and sire;Subject and servile to all discontents,As dry combustious matter is to fire:Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy,They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.
William Shakespeare
To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult of all.
Johann von Goethe
Time brings all things to pass.
Aeschylus
The man who melts With social sympathy though not allied Is of more worth than a thousand kinsmen.
Euripides
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
W Somerset Maugham
For what is truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.
Oscar Wilde
One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
Graham Greene
I respect kindness in human beings first of all and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law I have a total irreverance for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer the beer stronger the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them.
George Bernard Shaw
When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing. The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave.
Cormac McCarthy
If science can eliminate sleep, we will have more time to live and no time for the dreams. But living is superior to the dream because it is real!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Work hard to gain the heart of the people; if you gain it, you will gain everything else!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Everyone’s alone—or so it seems to me.They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;They make faces, and think they understand each other,And I’m sure they don’t. Is that delusion?Can we only loveSomething created in our own imaginations?
T.S Eliot
Energy will do anything that can be done in this world.
Johann von Goethe
There is no greater power than that of a laugh and happiness is a force which can save a person from the horrors of the world.
Hillary DePiano
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come.
William Shakespeare
Every long separation is a test: A test to see how powerful or how weak the will of reuniting is!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We'd all be lucky in life if we had the chance to experience an unexpected adventure, and then make our way back safely to a place of comfort. Sometimes the only way we can appreciate our home and the simple happiness it has to offer is to be away from it for a while.
Noble Smith
Countless as the sands of the sea are human passions.
Nikolai Gogol
This is the very ecstasy of love,Whose violent property fordoes itselfAnd leads the will to desperate undertakingsAs oft as any passion under heavenThat does afflict our natures.
William Shakespeare
Helmer: I would gladly work night and day for you. Nora- bear sorrow and want for your sake. But no man would sacrifice his honor for the one he loves.Nora: It is a thing hundreds of thousands of women have done.
Henrik Ibsen
The worn soles of Daffy's boots skidded on the icy stones. He'd been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he'd come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal.
Emma Donoghue
I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows.
Oscar Wilde
Passion is a rare flower that grows on the precipice of death. A few snatch it, and the rest are like an ox chewing its cud in a field.
Saunders Lewis
In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.
Samuel Beckett
While there is tea, there is hope.")
Arthur Wing Pinero
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
Ah,steeds,steeds,what is steeds! Has the whirlwind a home in your manes? Is there a sensitive ear, alert as a flame, in your every fiber? Hearing the familiar song from above, all in one accord you strain your bronze chests and, hooves barely touching the ground, turn into straight lines cleaving the air, and all inspired by God it rushes on!
Nikolai Gogol
The time is out of joint.
William Shakespeare
To undo a Jew is charity and not sin.
Christopher Marlowe
Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.
Oscar Wilde
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise
Oscar Wilde
Travellers ne'er did lie,Though fools at home condemn 'em.-Antonio
William Shakespeare
What we are is not all that we may become.
William Shakespeare
We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Honoré de Balzac
A wise fellow who is also worthless always charms the rabble.
Euripides
Why do we tell lies? We lie because the truth is too painful or too shameful for us to face, or because the truth is simply inconvenient and has to be suppressed before it’s allowed to disturb us. We invent lies because, for whatever reason, we want to invent reality. And the false reality which we invent, the world we make up by our lying, has one great advantage for us: It makes no claim on us. It demands nothing. It doesn’t shape us in the way that truth shapes us; it faces us with no obligations; it has no hard, resistant surfaces which we can’t get through. A lie is a made-up reality, and so never unsettles, never criticizes, never resists, never overthrows us. It’s the world, not as it is, but as we wish it to be: a world organized around us and our desires, the perfect environment in which we can be left at peace to be ourselves and to follow our own good or evil purposes.
John Webster
But we know that we are no longer the same, and not only know that we are no longer the same, but know in what we are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inconvenience, whereas sorrow is a thing you can keep on adding to all your life long, is it not, like a stamp or egg collection
Samuel Beckett
He looked like some plant bleached by darkness.
Honoré de Balzac
Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.
William Shakespeare
The light on her face was a lesson, a book that she hoped he would want to read, but he looked away from her...she did not want this man to leave her alone. He was kind. And she feared the loneliness of dreaming
Caryl Phillips
You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.
Eve Ensler
One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.
Alfred Jarry
Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.
Françoise Sagan
Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.
Cormac McCarthy
Superfluity was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these hedges, these paths. Vainly I strove to compute the number of the chestnut trees, or their distance from the Velleda, or their height as compared with that of the plane trees; each of them escaped from the pattern I made for it, overflowed from it or withdrew. And I too among them, vile, languorous, obscene, chewing the cud of my thoughts, I too was superfluous. [I is you or I or anyone.] Luckily I did not feel it, I only understood it, but I felt uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it. . . . I thought vaguely of doing away with myself, to do away with at least one of these superfluous existences. But my death – my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling garden – would have been superfluous as well. I was superfluous to all eternity.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple who struck off the ear of the high priest's servant, our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism.
Graham Greene
The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures. Lady Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.
Emma Donoghue
Do not let me hearOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
T.S Eliot
Mama:...you can keep trying. You can get brave and try some more. You don't have to give up.Jessie: I'm NOT giving up. This IS the other thing I'm trying. And I'm sure there are some other things that might work, but MIGHT work isn't good enough any more. I need something that WILL work. THIS will work. That's why I picked it.
Marsha Norman
Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.
Franz Grillparzer
The most precious light is the one that visits you in your darkest hour!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Simple things relieve eyes; simple things ease mind, simple things create meditation, simple things are simply miraculous!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
Oscar Wilde
Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
One man's poison ivy is another man's spinach.
George Ade