Quotes by Dramatists - Page 5

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield
W.B. Yeats
...I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl -- a cousin I think -- having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where she knew [my grandfather] would pass near four o'clock on the way to his dinner, said to him, 'If I were you and you were a little girl, I would give you a doll.
W.B. Yeats
Affliction is a good man's shining time.
Edward Young
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
W.B. Yeats
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
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.
W.B. Yeats
Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lustLike diamonds, we are cut with our own dust
John Webster
How may I hate that which I love with such intensity of passion? How should I abhor that for which my every drop of blood is boiling?
Ludwig Tieck
Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself.
W.B. Yeats
And the next day the gondolier came with a train of other gondoliers, all decked in their holiday garb, and on his gondola sat Angela, happy, and blushing at her happiness. Then he and she entered the house in which I dwelt, and came into my room (and it was strange indeed, after so many years of inversion, to see her with her head above her feet!), and then she wished me happiness and a speedy restoration to good health (which could never be); and I in broken words and with tears in my eyes, gave her the little silver crucifix that had stood by my bed or my table for so many years. And Angela took it reverently, and crossed herself, and kissed it, and so departed with her delighted husband.And as I heard the song of the gondoliers as they went their way--the song dying away in the distance as the shadows of the sundown closed around me--I felt that they were singing the requiem of the only love that had ever entered my heart.
W.S. Gilbert
If language had been the creation, not of poetry, but of logic, we should only have one.
Friedrich Hebbel
I went out to the hazel woodbecause a fire was in my headcut and peeled a hazel wandand hooked a berry to a threadand when white moths were on the wingand moth-like stars were flickering outI dropped the berry in a stream,and caught a little silver trout....(Song of Wandering Aengus)
W.B. Yeats
An Irish Airman foresees his DeathI Know that I shall meet my fatet Somewhere among the clouds above;t Those that I fight I do not hatet Those that I guard I do not love, My country is Kiltartan Cross,My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,t No likely end could bring them losst Or leave them happier than before.t Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,t Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,t A lonely impulse of delightt Drove to this tumult in the clouds;t I balanced all, brought all to mind,t The years to come seemed waste of breath,A waste of breath the years behindt In balance with this life, this death.
W.B. Yeats
With horror he perceived that, by uniting himself as he had with the dead, he had cut himself off from the living. Stripped of all earthly hope, bereft of every consolation, he was rendered as poor as mortal can possiblybe on this side of the grave.
Ludwig Tieck
You know what whore is. Next the devil adultery,Enters the devil murder.
John Webster
As in this world there are degrees of evils, So in this world there are degrees of devils.
John Webster
Fortune’s a right whore:If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,That she may take away all at one swoop.
John Webster
There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.
Daniil Kharms
Never shall a young man,Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear,Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.
W.B. Yeats
By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries Path.' Every evening they travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of God, who are you?' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.' She woke her husband and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he. ("Village Ghosts")
W.B. Yeats
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams
W.B. Yeats
Round these men stories tended to group themselves, sometimes deserting more ancient heroes for the purpose. Round poets have they gathered especially, for poetry in Ireland has always been mysteriously connected with magic.
W.B. Yeats
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
W.B. Yeats
Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
W.B. Yeats
Deep vengeance is the daughter of deep silence.
Vittorio Alfieri
Oh, dry the glistening tear that dues that marshal cheekThy loving childern here in them thy comfort seek With sympathetic care their arms around the creep, For oh they can not bear to see their father weep
W.S. Gilbert
Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try: We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.
John Webster
Through darkness diamonds spread their richest light.
John Webster
Probably you were not quite well, my little dove, when you wrote to me, for a note of real melancholy pervaded your letter. I recognized in it a nature closely akin to my own. I know the feeling only too well. In my life, too, there are days, hours, weeks, aye, and months, in which everything looks black, when I am tormented by the thought that I am forsaken, that no one cares for me. Indeed, my life is of little worth to anyone. Were I to vanish from the face of the earth to-day, it would be no great loss to Russian music, and would certainly cause no one great unhappiness. In short, I live a selfish bachelor’s life. I work for myself alone, and care only for myself. This is certainly very comfortable, although dull, narrow, and lifeless. But that you, who are indispensable to so many whose happiness you make, that you can give way to depression, is more than I can believe. How can you doubt for a moment the love and esteem of those who surround you? How could it be possible not to love you? No, there is no one in the world more dearly loved than you are. As for me, it would be absurd to speak of my love for you. If I care for anyone, it is for you, for your family, for my brothers and our old Dad. I love you all, not because you are my relations, but because you are the best people in the world.
Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Take it for words. O woman’s poor revenge,Which dwells but in the tongue!
John Webster
It’s hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn’t know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I'll write about Pushkin after all.Yet, after Gogol, it’s a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can’t write anything about Gogol. So I’d rather not write anything about anyone.
Daniil Kharms
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
W.B. Yeats
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none
Jules Renard
Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
W.B. Yeats
When all is said and done, how do we not know but that our own unreason may be better than another’s truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into the world again, wild bees, wild bees!
W.B. Yeats
Believing can mean something a good deal less than certainty. I believe the bus will come in five minutes, but I can’t be sure. Or sometimes it can mean the kind of knowledge which is acquired after scrupulous review of evidence to build up a cumulative case for some conviction. But believing [as Scripture presents it] is not half-certainty, nor the fruit of mental effort. It’s belief in the deep, strong sense of giving allegiance to something which overwhelms us. To believe in the Lord Jesus…is to do far more than simply give him a passing nod with the mind or even to honor him with our religious devotion. It’s the astonished business of being so overthrown by his reality, so mastered by his sheer presence, so judged by him, that we can do nothing other than acknowledge that he is supremely real, supremely true. To believe in him is to confess him—to affirm with mind and will and heart that he fills all things, that our only hope lies in his name. ¶ Belief in this sense concerns the entire shape of a personal life. It embraces the whole of us. It’s not one department of our life, something in which we engage alongside all the other things we do—working, loving, hoping, creating, worrying, and so on. Believing is about the way in which we dispose the world of our existence. We believe when we’re totally shaped by something outside of us, acknowledging that it has put a decisive stamp on all that we are and all that we do. This is why belief in this deep, strong sense defines us completely: We’re “believers,” doing all that we do out of the inescapable conviction that the Lord Jesus is the persistent factor in the whole of our life. Believing in him, confessing him, involves no less than everything.
John Webster
Our believing has no power of itself; we certainly aren’t saved by belief. We’re saved by the grace and goodness and majesty of him in whom we believe—by the one whom we confess as we believe. In a real sense, our belief is nothing in and of itself. It’s simply a looking to him, a listening to him, in which we are wholly absorbed by that which we see and hear.
John Webster
We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.
W.B. Yeats
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is saidIt was the dream itself enchanted me("The Circus Animal's Desertion")
W.B. Yeats
I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.
W.B. Yeats
The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one,Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.
W.B. Yeats
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
W.B. Yeats
The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
W.B. Yeats
I'm really very sorry for you all, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.
W.S. Gilbert
I have loved him too much not to hate
Jean Racine
True courage consists in being courageous precisely when when we're not.
Jules Renard
Often the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die.
Vittorio Alfieri
there is only one true heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it
Roman Rolland
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,For I would ride with you upon the wind,Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
W.B. Yeats
O that I were a man, or that I had powerTo execute my apprehended wishes!I would whip some with scorpions.
John Webster
I carry the Sun in a Golden Cup, the Moon in a Silver Bag.
W.B. Yeats
Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;Remember the wisdom out of the old days:*Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,And the winds that blow through the starry ways,Let the starry winds and the flame and the floodCover over and hide, for he has no partWith the lonely, majestical multitude*.
W.B. Yeats
THAT crazed girl improvising her music.Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,Her soul in division from itselfClimbing, falling She knew not where,Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declareA beautiful lofty thing, or a thingHeroically lost, heroically found.No matter what disaster occurredShe stood in desperate music wound,Wound, wound, and she made in her triumphWhere the bales and the baskets layNo common intelligible soundBut sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea
W.B. Yeats
The peasant is the only species of human being who doesn't like the country and never looks at it.
Jules Renard
I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.
W.B. Yeats
How many loved your moments of glad grace,And loved your beauty with love false or true,But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
W.B. Yeats
Princes give rewards with their own hands,But death or punishment by the hands of other.
John Webster
Check-ups are, in my experience, a grave mistake; all they do is allow the quack of your choice to tell you that you have some sort of complaint that you were far happier not knowing about.
John Mortimer
In dreams begin responsibilities
W.B. Yeats
One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.
W.B. Yeats