Quotes by Playwrights - Page 127

Alas, everything that men say to one another is alike; the ideas they exchange are almost always the same, in their conversation. But inside all those isolated machines, what hidden recesses, what secret compartments! It is an entire world that each one carries within him, an unknown world that is born and dies in silence! What solitudes all these human bodies are!
Alfred de Musset
When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.
Graham Greene
My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.
Oscar Wilde
The thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination.
Carson McCullers
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard
It was not really Saturday night, at least it may have been, for they had long lost count of the days; but always if they wanted to do anything special they said this was Saturday night, and then they did it.
J.M. Barrie
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
Oscar Wilde
Hate is a lack of imagination.
Graham Greene
One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)
Ingmar Bergman
It's okay to fail. It does not make you forever a failure. In fact, there are no failures really. Only human beings doing the best they can.
Christy Hall
Man is free rather than man is freedom.
Jean-Paul Sartre
What is it we call life anyway? The lights that flash within us from time to time. Those lit moments, these tiny dots, one by one, added on from one end to the other, intermingling with each other sometimes, one on top of the other, or slipped underneath; this combination of dots that moves forward, constantly changing places and directions, creates very beautiful music.
Adalet Ağaoğlu
There is no reality except in action. Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.
Jean-Paul Sartre
You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You lost life's secret.
Oscar Wilde
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:Then, heigh-ho, the holly!This life is most jolly.
William Shakespeare
One face of the cloud sees the sun, other face of the cloud sees the darkness! To survive in this universe, you must do the same! See the sun, see the darkness! Enjoy the life, but prepare for the worst as well!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Though the life is very difficult and at times quite tragic, we must nonetheless be happy for being existed, for being the miracle very itself!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Act so that every action of yours should be capable of becoming an universal rule of action for all men.
W Somerset Maugham
It looked as though you did not act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in a certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with it. There was no such thing as truth. Each man was his own philosopher (...). "The thing then was to discover what one was and one's system of philosophy would devise itself. It seems to Philip that there were three things to find out: man's relation to the world he lives in, man's relation to the men among whom he lives, and finally man's relation to himself.
W Somerset Maugham
We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.
Jean Genet
If you want the waves to touch you softly, have a walk on the sea coasts; if you want the life to touch you softly, have a walk on the reason’s coasts, because reason is a shield that softens the strokes of life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Sometimes a strong wind blows suddenly and you leave your beloved tree without saying even goodbye, like a pale autumn leaf! This uncertainty of life makes every moment in life infinitely precious.
Mehmet Murat ildan
I give the truths of to-morrow.""I prefer the mistakes of today.
Oscar Wilde
Your life will be colourful if you just add colours to your life! It is your own decisions that will determine to have a miserable or a marvellous life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Let the ‘why not’ philosophy be your life principle!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Where do songs go when you cease to hear them? Where does the turbulence of the air disappear after thousands of birds flap their wings homeward at eventide? Where are the cries of the Rajput women who spatter their red palm prints on the wall and leap into the flames of johar? Where is my childhood, my catapult, my broken slate, my first parrot, my youth and first sin and all those that followed, where is my old age and the first time I saw the woman from Merta? Ask Gambhiree. She knows it all.
Kiran Nagarkar
All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.
Oscar Wilde
How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene.'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.''And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer.
Honoré de Balzac
The mere fact that Lottie had come and gone away again made things seem a little worse-just as perhaps prisoners feel a little more desolate after visitors come and go, leaving them behind.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
But there is nothing enduring in the world, and therefore even joy in the second minute is already not as acute as in the first; in the third minute it becomes still weaker and finally merges unnoticeably with the usual condition of the soul, as a circle on the water, caused by the fall of a pebble, finally merges with the smooth surface.
Nikolai Gogol
Sadness is one of the best universities in life! Though bad things take good things from us, they do give us useful things as well!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers ; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them. On the other hand, when he is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyse it, just as if happiness were his right.
Luigi Pirandello
But I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald like moulten lead.
William Shakespeare
Nicole had put on weight. This is the effect which, in three cases out of four, unhappiness has upon women. The process of eating guarantees at least the health of the body.
Françoise Sagan
Where were me parents? Where were Becky? I felt so alone, so lost that I could not see. By that I mean, everything round me were a blur, everything inside me were a blur of fear and shock. I heard meself crying and moaning, My oh my, my oh my . . . I still have nightmares ’bout that time. I still feel like a sharp piece ofice has stabbed me heart real deep. I was filled, filled to the brim with utter baffle and utter loneliness. p. 15
Louis Nowra
Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of pleasure.
Honoré de Balzac
You know you may feel very sad like a child whose toy is broken; but then you know sun rises, life continues and you start laughing again!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Sad is one of those words that has given up its life for our country, it's been a martyr for the American dream, it's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture to suggest a tinge of discomfort that lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen, the time it takes to change a channel. But sadness is real because once it meant something real. It meant dignified, grave; it meant trustworthy; it meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful; it meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body; it meant falling heavily; and it meant of a color: dark. It meant dark in color, to darken. It meant me. I felt sad.
Claudia Rankine
Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try: We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.
John Webster
How can I pretend that nothing happened?
Diane Samuels
And did with sighs their fate deplore,Since I must shelter them no more;And if before my joys were such,In having heard, and seen too much,My grief must be as great and high,When all abandoned I shall be,Doomed to a silent destiny.
Aphra Behn
Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it—I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?
Sarah Ruhl
Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upwardTo what they were before.
William Shakespeare
The sad thing was in the knowing that all their nerve would get them nowhere in the world and that they were lost as all the people in Brooklyn seem lost when the day is nearly over and even though the sun is still bright, it is thin and doesn’t give you warmth when it shines on you.
Betty Smith
But there are not two laws, that was the next thing I thought I understood, not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but one only to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all, I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers.
Samuel Beckett
A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or grey, but I no longer live. Psychiaters tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterwards assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death..
Anton Chekhov
​Sebastian: By your patience, no. My stars shine darkly over me; the malignancy of my fate might, perhaps, distemper yours; therefore I shall carve of you your leave that I may bear my evils alone. It were a bad recompense for your love to lay any of them on you.
William Shakespeare
Must it so be that whatever makes man happy must later become the source of his misery?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If you are happy with your present time, you will look at your past with happy eyes even if you have had a sad past!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The face of poverty is a mixture of sincerity and sadness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A sad soul needs an infinite horizon which can throw all his sorrow into the silence of the eternal emptiness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Photos which captures human sadness are the noblest and the most meaningful of all the photos!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Lebedev: A time has come of sorrow and sadness for you. Man, my dear friend, is like a samovar. It doesn't always stand on a shelf in the chill but sometimes they put hot coals in it and it goes psh... psh! This comparison is worthless but you won't think up a cleverer one.
Anton Chekhov
A mist is rolling over the fields. Why is a summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?
Dodie Smith
Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone.She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.
Cormac McCarthy
How pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.
Oscar Wilde
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
Oscar Wilde
I have a soul of leadSo stakes me to the ground I cannot move.
William Shakespeare
Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a specialprovidence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will benow; if it be not now, yet it will come: thereadiness is all.
William Shakespeare
The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.
Samuel Beckett