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
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
Dine on little and sup on less.
Miguel de Cervantes
No one is happy all his life long.
Euripides
Never have a friend that's poorer than yourself.
Douglas Jerrold
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
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
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
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
Tis time to die, when 'tis a shame to live.
Thomas Middleton
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
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
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
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
Countries which are governed by the dabblers will undoubtedly turn into the miserable countries!
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
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
A country where there is no security of life is certainly not a country but just a slaughter house!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To reach your target quicker, don’t lose your time by looking back!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When you are in trouble, you are the nearest first person who can help you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Seeing the obvious is often harder than seeing the hidden!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Storm will never take you in consideration whether you take the storm in consideration or not!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The uncertainty of the future is a great blessing for us humans! Let the road ahead of us be completely unknown for us so that we can have the marvellous joy of discovering it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
...The fact that it's black transforms it. Has the same effect on women that black stockings have on men.
Daphne du Maurier
When the wind likes a path, the weeds around that path will tremble all day long!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The path to tranquility gets through the storms!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Water is the most perfect traveller because when it travels it becomes the path itself!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The best comedy on earth shows up when an immoral person talks about the morals!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Good ideas never require guns; and if an idea requires guns, it is not a good idea!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.)
Elfriede Jelinek
The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men's. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will set off chains of consequences. Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.
Thornton Wilder
Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in
Tennessee Williams
If ten men are trying to lynch one allegedly vile person, than we can be completely sure that there are ten vile people and one allegedly vile person over there! Don’t forget, violence makes you a low man!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To live is to paint, it is to create; but while we are painting, we are being painted, being created as well!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are to accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Yukio Mishima
Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist, and that I am not a gibbering moron.
Eoin Colfer
NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
Sinclair Lewis
Isn't it fun to work— or don't you ever do it? It's especially fun when your kind of work is the thing you'd rather do more than anything else in the world. I've been writing as fast as my pen would go every day this summer, and my only quarrel with life is that the days aren't long enough to write all the beautiful and valuable and entertaining thoughts I'm thinking. I've finished the second draft of my book and am going to begin the third tomorrow morning at half-past seven. It's the sweetest book you ever saw— it is, truly. I think of nothing else. I can barely wait in the morning to dress and eat before beginning; then I write and write and write till suddenly I'm so tired that I'm limp all over.
Jean Webster
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)
Oscar Wilde
After three years of English at Cambridge, being force-fed literary theory, I was almost convinced that literature was all coded messages about Marxism and the death of the self. I crawled out of the post-structuralist desert thirsty for heroines I could cry and laugh with. I was jaded. I craved trash.
Samantha Ellis
It really is better to be lucky than to be good.
Jeff Lindsay