Quotes by Playwrights

The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to.
Anton Chekhov
If you join the rat race — you're in the race of rats.
Bertolt Brecht
Who can stop grief's avalanche once it starts to roll.
Euripides
Old loves are dropped when new ones come
Euripides
Mortal fate is hard. You'd best get used to it.
Euripides
Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!It seems she hangs upon the cheek of nightLike a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear,Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.So shows a snowy dove trooping with crowsAs yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand.Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
William Shakespeare
It is terrible to speak well and be wrong.
Sophocles
He that doth the ravens feed. Yea providently caters for the sparrow. Be comfort to my age!
William Shakespeare
Dine on little and sup on less.
Miguel de Cervantes
Are you good men and true?
William Shakespeare
No one is happy all his life long.
Euripides
Never have a friend that's poorer than yourself.
Douglas Jerrold
Better is half a loaf than no bread.
John Heywood
Decisiveness is often the art of timely cruelty.
Henry Becque
Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favourite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, 'There is no lavender word for lynch'.
Wole Soyinka
He who sees a gold bullion more valuable than a tree has surely an intelligence much less than a donkey’s!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.
Edna Ferber
You will face yourself again in a moment of terror and will learn once again that old lesson you keep forgetting: that you can escape from anywhere, but you cannot flee your own self.
Mihail Sebastian
But what is your life? Can you see it? It vanishes at its own appearance. Moment by moment. Until it vanishes to appear no more. When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way o show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet is all we have.
Cormac McCarthy
Stop fretting and eat your Madeira Cake..
Diane Samuels
For the bored souls, sometimes sea is the best answer!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Women may fail when there is no strength in man
William Shakespeare
How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love hath reason, Reason none, If what parts, can so remain.
William Shakespeare
-Gardener: ...Go thou, and like an executioner,Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays,That look too lofty in our commonwealth:All must be even in our government.You thus employ'd, I will go root awayThe noisome weeds, which without profit suckThe soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.+Servant:Why should we in the compass of a paleKeep law and form and due proportion,Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,Her fruit-trees all upturned, her hedges ruin'd,Her knots disorder'd and her wholesome herbsSwarming with caterpillars?-Gardener:Hold thy peace! He that hath suffer'd this disorder'd springHath now himself met with the fall of leaf.,,
William Shakespeare
This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 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?
William Shakespeare
When you take pictures of nature with passion, nature poses for you more passionately!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The children had had an argument once about whether there was more grass in the world or more sand, and Roger said that of course there must be more sand because of under the sea; in every ocean all over the world there would be sand, if you looked deep down. But there could be grass too, argued Deborah, a waving grass, a grass that nobody had ever seen, and the colour of that ocean grass would be darker than any grass on the surface of the world, in fields or prairies or people's gardens in America. It would be taller than tress and it would move like corn in the wind. ("The Pool
Daphne du Maurier
Tis time to die, when 'tis a shame to live.
Thomas Middleton
A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people's lives a burden with her presence.
Stefan Zweig
I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door.
Susan Hill
She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.
Elias Canetti
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
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defence against betrayal.
Tennessee Williams
The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.
Lord Dunsany
In life, there are many hills and valleys to pass and you cannot avoid them! The most important thing you need is to know this: You must pass them!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Politicians are like little cats: They are never serious; they always mess up the things; they are fainthearted and spoilt. And when they look at the mirror, they see a tiger there, till the hammer of reality break that mirror very harshly!
Mehmet Murat ildan
With Cats, some say, one rule is true:Don’t speak till you are spoken to.Myself, I do not hold with that —I say, you should ad-dress a Cat.But always keep in mind that heResents familiarity.I bow, and taking off my hat,Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat!But if he is the Cat next door,Whom I have often met before(He comes to see me in my flat)I greet him with an oopsa Cat!I think I've heard them call him James —But we've not got so far as names.
T.S Eliot
And why, she began to ask, did she rage against individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was unembittered laughter.
Sinclair Lewis
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
Tennessee Williams
Don’t perceive the facts as a false criticism or else you lose badly! Because facts are facts and they need to be respected and be taken into consideration promptly!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Some politicians are much noisier than the dogs! Just like teaching a dog how to hush, public must likewise teach those politicians to shush!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
Oscar Wilde
MOLLY: You don't like New Years Eve? Are you insane? It's literally the best holiday ever. You just party all night and it doesn't matter what stupid stuff you do because the year's over and you get a brand new start in the morning.
Hillary DePiano
Opium makes you quick-witted - perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so important.
Graham Greene
An African who loses the ability to die with dignity is a lost man.
Henning Mankell
Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour’s meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?
W Somerset Maugham
Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You’re a tiger, a lion, a cat. You spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied. You’re twenty five. If rings had been fastened to the earth and sky, you’d have seized them and pulled the sky down to earth
Isaac Babel
He'd have improved if you'd not givenHim a mere glimmer of the light in heaven;He calls it Reason, and it has only increasedHis power to be beastlier than a beast.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.
Tennessee Williams
For the cowards, all doors are locked; for the daring, all doors are open!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Countries which are governed by the dabblers will undoubtedly turn into the miserable countries!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For an incurious person, an open door will be no different than a wall!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For a clever man, different cultures, different lives, different attitudes, different dreams, different of everything are a good teacher! You only take the things you already know from somebody or something like you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Similar souls wander in the similar places! They may not know each other, but often they touch the same winds, they step on the same leaves, their looks are lost in the same horizons!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There is no such thing as a non-dangerous dictator! Like all the venomous snakes, all dictators are dangerous! Then what is the antidote? Antidote is our love for freedom and our unshakable determination on the matter of keeping this love!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every time a stupid politician says something stupid, you don’t have to reply to him, because it is nonsense to shoo every barking dog away!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When you turn your back to the truth, the truth will soon appear before you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A country where there is no security of life is certainly not a country but just a slaughter house!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Mountains which block your way are mostly created by your own wrong thinking!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There is no honour in exploiting people and there is also no honour in exploiting animals! Using people or using animals for our own interests is nothing but an arrogant immorality!
Mehmet Murat ildan