Quotes by Playwrights - Page 134

If a thing which is believed by billions is against the reason and not supported by the science, it is a great honour not to be amongst those billions!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Each of us can walk only the path he sees at his own feet. Each of us is subject to the consequences of his own belief.
Morris West
I was lost a long time, without knowing it. Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints, except the constraints of custom, convention and the law, and these are flexible enough for most purposes. It is only later that terror comes. One is free - but free in chaos, in an unexplained and unexplainable world. One is free in a desert, from which there is no retreat but inward, toward the hollow core of oneself. There is nothing to build on but the small rock of one's own pride, and this is a nothing, based on nothing... I think, therefore I am. But what am I? An accident of disorder, going no place.
Morris West
I don't believe in miracles, only unexplained facts.
Morris West
You may spend fifty or eighty years of your life believing in something totally false, and this is what happens to most people!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?
Aristophanes
No parent should have to bury a child ... No mother should have to bury a son. Mothers are not meant to bury sons. It is not in the natural order of things.I buried my son. In a potter's field. In a field of Blood. In empty, acrid silence. There was no funeral. There were no mourners. His friends all absent. His father dead. His sisters refusing to attend. I discovered his body alone, I dug his grave alone, I placed him in a hole, and covered him with dirt and rock alone. I was not able to finish burying him before sundown, and I'm not sure if that affected his fate ...I begrudge God none of this. I do not curse him or bemoan my lot. And though my heart keeps beating only to keep breaking--I do not question why.I remember the morning my son was born as if it was yesterday. The moment the midwife placed him in my arms, I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding. I remember holding my son, and looking over at my own mother and saying, "Now I understand why the sun comes up at day and the stars come out at night. I understand why rain falls gently. Now I understand you, Mother" ...I loved my son every day of his life, and I will love him ferociously long after I've stopped breathing. I am a simple woman. I am not bright or learn-ed. I do not read. I do not write. My opinions are not solicited. My voice is not important ... On the day of my son's birth I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding ... The world tells me that God is in Heaven and that my son is in Hell. I tell the world the one true thing I know: If my son is in Hell, then there is no Heaven--because if my son sits in Hell, there is no God.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
I may not believe that 'all things happen for a reason.' But I do believe that reason may come from all things that happen.
Shellen Lubin
Any belief which encourages you to use your own intellect, which motivates you to question everything and points out your own mind as the only road for your salvation is a good belief!
Mehmet Murat ildan
MURRY: I believe in a lot of things. Santa Claus, magic, vampires, and even ghosts but I don't believe in luck. Good or bad.
Hillary DePiano
Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.
Cormac McCarthy
Just because you believe in something, you cannot expect others to respect for your belief! They may even make fun of it! All you have to do is to be peaceful at any time, with everyone! Something holy for you may be just a rubbish for others! All you have to do is to be peaceful at any time, with everyone!
Mehmet Murat ildan
People always say that in England we lead shallow lives. Our lives must be shallow because we live in a country where nobody believes in anything any more. My whole life, I've been told: 'Western civilization? An old bitch gone in the teeth,' And so people say, go to Israel. Because in Israel at least people are fighting. In Israel, they're fighting for something they believe in.
David Hare
Cut the connection between your clothes and your beliefs, because clothes will not make you something, it won’t make you honest or dishonest, good or bad! Your essence will not change because of what you wear!
Mehmet Murat ildan
HANNAH: You had a vision.PRIOR: A vision. Thank you, Maria Ouspenskaya. I'm not so far gone I can be assuaged by pity and lies.HANNAH: I don't have pity. It's just not something I have.(Little pause)One hundred and seventy years ago, which is recent, an angel of God appeared to Joseph Smith in upstateNew York, not far from here. People have visions.PRIOR: But that's preposterous, that's...HANNAH: It's not polite to call other people's beliefs preposterous.He had great need of understanding. Our Prophet. His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that.PRIOR: I don't. And I'm sorry but it's repellent to me. So much of what you believe.HANNAH: What do I believe?PRIOR: I'm a homosexual. With AIDS. I can just imagine what you ...HANNAH: No you can't. Imagine. The things in my head.You don't make assumptions about me, mister; I won't make them about you.
Tony Kushner
For any kind of problem, we must first undoubtedly believe that we can absolutely solve it! Then, the solution will come; it is our determination and our utter belief on this matter that shall bring the solution!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Let me give you a New Year message: Believe in yourself, because no one ever achieved anything significant without believing in himself and no one ever will! Believe in yourself powerfully, especially when there is no reason left to believe in yourself because the ultimate bottom is the best place to start a big rise!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe.
Niall Williams
Your belief is mostly your prison! To discover the world outside your prison, you must first realize the walls surrounding you! Otherwise you shall continue being stuck in the prison of childish tales and fallacious illusions!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Everything will turn into a ruin, even your beliefs will turn into a ruin! There will be no more believers from your belief, there will be only the viewers around your belief, watching this belief of once upon a time, and now just a ruin!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We believe we have dived down to the most unfathomable depths, and when we reappear on the surface, the drop of water that glistens on our trembling finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We believe we have discovered a grotto that is stored with bewildering treasure; we come back to the light of day, and the gems we have brought are false – mere pieces of glass – and yet does the treasure shine on, unceasingly, in the darkness!
Maurice Maeterlinck
If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.
Graham Greene
Every irrational and unscientific belief will ruin your life! Your own wrong belief will be your own tragic punishment!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What millions believe is often just fairy tales for children! The fabrications of the past are ridiculously accepted as the holies of people! Glory lies in searching the truth not in believing the irrational legends!
Mehmet Murat ildan
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
I don’t see why the things we believe absolutely now shouldn’t be just as wrong as what they believed in the past.’‘Neither do I.’‘Then how can you believe anything at all?’‘I don’t know.
W Somerset Maugham
He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. In Alphonso's Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan snakes 'with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs.' There was a gem in the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and 'by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe' the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep and slain. According to the great alchemist, Pierre de Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her color. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. The bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm that could cure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was the aspirates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any danger by fire.
Oscar Wilde
Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.
Betty Smith
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
Jean-Paul Sartre
No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
George Bernard Shaw
Man is what he believes.
Anton Chekhov
She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them.
Cormac McCarthy
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
Derek Walcott
The future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
Arthur Wing Pinero
…if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it’s a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you’re thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be.
Tony Kushner
Since the future is unknown, in every step forward we walk to the unknown!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What is our life: (Pause.) it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment?
David Mamet
Was she acting entirely consciously? No: women are always sincere, even in the midst of their most shocking duplicities, because it is always some natural emotion which dominates them. Perhaps, having given this young man such a hold on her, by having openly demonstrated her affection for him, Delphine was merely responding to a sense of personal dignity, which led her either to revoke any concessions she might have made or, at least, to enjoy suspending them. Even at the very moment when passion seizes her, it is perfectly natural for a Parisian woman to delay her final fall, as a way of testing the heart of the man into whose hands she is about to deliver herself and her future!
Honoré de Balzac
MRS PEARCE. Mr Higgins: youre tempting the girl. It’s not right. She should think of the future.HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of.
George Bernard Shaw
Look at towards the future! If you see something, it is your imagination only! Because the future is not there yet, it has not born yet!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You can only predict things after they have happened.
Eugène Ionesco
Live the future when it comes, not now, only when it comes! Now, only live the now!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Whatever it will bring, it will be good to be there, in the Land of Future!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Future is an empty paper, but not absolutely empty; the shadows of the drawings of the past is there, on the paper!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The future is forever a projection of the present.
Kōbō Abe
... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started.
Honoré de Balzac
Since the future is unknown, nobody can really know where he is going! When asked, tell them you know not where you are going! You can only say where you wish to go!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You know what the future is? It is a heavy fog which hides inside everything you can imagine!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What marvel things are waiting for us in the future? What horrible things are waiting for us? Whatever is waiting for us, we always want to be in the future, ready to celebrate and ready to fight!
Mehmet Murat ildan
NOEL: You can get excited about the future. The past won't mind.
Hillary DePiano
If somebody asks you where you are going, tell him you are going to everywhere, because future is a path going to everywhere!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What we are is not all that we may become.
William Shakespeare
In the future, you will always encounter the past!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Then indecision brings its own delays, And days are lost lamenting over lost days. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The most tragic thing about the future is that it may not come into being!
Mehmet Murat ildan
O that a man might knowThe end of this day's business ere it come!But it sufficeth that the day will endAnd then the end is known.
William Shakespeare