Quotes by Playwrights - Page 152

There is no more sagacious animal than the Icelandic horse. He is stopped by neither snow, nor storm, nor impassable roads, nor rocks, glaciers, or anything. He is courageous, sober, and surefooted. He never makes a false step, never shies. If there is a river or fjord to cross (and we shall meet with many) you will see him plunge in at once, just as if he were amphibious, and gain the opposite bank.
Jules Verne
An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed.
Knut Hamsun
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.
Oscar Wilde
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
Oscar Wilde
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.
John Galsworthy
At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned
Cormac McCarthy
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
William Shakespeare
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
Cormac McCarthy
Yes.Work is love made visible.
Ama Ata Aidoo
I don't know what the hell I'm workin' for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment–all alone. And I think of the rent I'm paying. And it's crazy. But then, it's what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I'm lonely.
Arthur Miller
When you do your works sincerely, you put wings to your works and then they will fly all over the world on their own!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it forever. And the only way we can redeem our past is by suffering and by giving ourselves over to exceptional labor, to steadfast and endless labor.
Anton Chekhov
When you do your work happily, work will disappear.
Mehmet Murat ildan
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
George Bernard Shaw
This could be a whole life," she thought. "You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this...
Betty Smith
Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it's a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner.
Jeff Lindsay
There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!
Anton Chekhov
Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.
Honoré de Balzac
In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find and continue to find grounds for marriage.
Robert Anderson
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
J.M. Barrie
Melt all the tanks in the world and make them rubbish bins. They will be much more useful for the humanity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The greatest gift you can leave to humanity is the beautiful trace you left behind yourself that invites people to reason, science and peace!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Though the stupid have great capacity to direct the world because they are plentiful, the clever has a much greater capacity to prevent the stupid from halting the progression of humanity because - though they are rare - they are tactical and intelligent!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If the humanity does not poison the minds of the children with all sort of religious craps, the new generations of humanity will soon create a new world order where reason and logic will be the sole guide, the sole savior!
Mehmet Murat ildan
While there are millions of hungry people all around the world, while there are thousands of homeless people in every country, while some continents are in a horrible poverty, while there are not enough schools, not enough hospitals in the entire world, building churches, mosques, synagogues or temples or spending money on guns, on war industry are the greatest treasons to humanity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Unless humanity gives top priority to the space science, there will be no future for the humanity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at the bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting for us in the next room.
Stefan Zweig
In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.
Sinclair Lewis
A superior atmosphere exists, in which we all know each other; and there is a mysterious truth – deeper far than the material truth - to which we at once have recourse, when we try to form a conception of a stranger. Have we not all experienced these things, which take place in the impenetrable regions of almost astral humanity?
Maurice Maeterlinck
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noiseHath chid down all the majesty of England;Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,And that you sit as kings in your desires,Authority quite silent by your brawl,And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;What had you got? I'll tell you: you had taughtHow insolence and strong hand should prevail,How order should be quelled; and by this patternNot one of you should live an aged man,For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishesWould feed on one another....Say now the kingShould so much come too short of your great trespassAs but to banish you, whither would you go?What country, by the nature of your error,Should give your harbour? go you to France or Flanders,To any German province, to Spain or Portugal, Nay, any where that not adheres to England,Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleasedTo find a nation of such barbarous temper,That, breaking out in hideous violence,Would not afford you an abode on earth,Whet their detested knives against your throats,Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that GodOwed not nor made you, nor that the claimantsWere not all appropriate to your comforts,But chartered unto them, what would you thinkTo be thus used? this is the strangers case;And this your mountainish inhumanity.
William Shakespeare
Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the start, total respect every time - kill one, kill a trainload, you're dissing the transcendental is all.
Tom Stoppard
The Self-confidence of the ignorant is one of the biggest disasters of the humanity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The remotest place on Earth can sometimes be the most attractive place on Earth especially in times when our belief in humanity is lost!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When you have much higher ethical values than the ethical values of your own people, you stop belonging to your own people, to your own country because your people and your country are now located in the low levels of humanity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Reaching the top of a high mountain is just a personal victory. But for a victory to be important for the society, it has to be useful for the humanity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The more we respect other creatures, the more respect our humanity will get!
Mehmet Murat ildan
People are always talking about it being their duty to find their way to their fellow men — to their neighbour, as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false sentiment — when in fact it is purely and simply a question of finding their way to themselves. Let each first find his way to himself! And since hardly anyone has yet found his way to himself, it is inconceivable that any of these unfortunate millions has ever found his way to another human being — or to his neighbour, as they say, dripping with self-deception.
Thomas Bernhard
Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women—that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. I do not think I am being extreme. When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy of the planet. You force what is meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative, and alive to be bent, infertile, and broken.
Eve Ensler
History is full of paths and the most useful, the most rational paths for humanity is mostly empty!
Mehmet Murat ildan
...the pleasures of the world are chiefly folly, and the business of it mostly knavery, and both nothing better than vanity; the men of pleasure tearing one another to pieces from the emulation of spending money, and the men of business from envy in getting it.
Henry Fielding
Nobody scarce doth any good, yet they all agree in praising those who do. Indeed, it is strange that all men should consent in commending goodness, and no man endeavour to deserve that commendation; whilst, on the contrary, all rail at wickedness, and all are as eager to be what they abuse.
Henry Fielding
It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Turn back to humanity – to the world – to love! Become gardeners – whatever you want! – become nothing! – and the whole of space will be free for you.
Alfred Wolfenstein
If you see only your coreligionists as your brothers, you aren’t only a good man but also you are very low in morality! Your brothers are the whole humanity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of our generation you shall find.
William Shakespeare
If you ever get a high official position in your country, you must see the interests of the humanity much more important than the interests of your own country; only then you will deserve to be called a great man!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Literature deals with morality but does not necessarily, does not, qua literature, help you to be more moral, either by precept or example. It makes you more aware. Which is to say that it makes you more human by making life more, not less, difficult. When you become more aware, the area of moral choice is widened. You can be a better man; you can also be a worse. Literature will not determine which. It is the equivalent of neither grace nor good works.
Eric Bentley
Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes.And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.
Howard Zinn
Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.
Joseph Heller
Brandon, until this very moment, the world and the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensible to me, and I've tried to clear my way with logic and superior intellect, and you've thrown by own words right back in my face; you've given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of, and you tried to twist them into a cold logical excuse for your ugly murder!Tonight you've made me ashamed of every concept I've ever had, of superior or inferior beings, but I thank you for that shame, because now I know that we're each of us a separate human being, Brandon, with the right to live and work and think as individuals, but with an obligation to the society that we live in. By what right do you dare say that there's a superior few to which you belong? By what right did you dare decide that that boy in there [he's referencing the dead body of "David," lying in a trunk in the middle of the room] was inferior and therefore could be killed?Did you think you were God Brandon? Is that what you thought when you choked the life out of him? Is that what you thought when you served food from his grave! I don't know what you thought or what you are, but I know what you've done—YOU'VE MURDERED! You've strangled the life of a fellow human being who could live and love as you never could... and never will again!
Arthur Laurents
The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same—dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits—the repetition through the ages is comedy.
Dawn Powell
It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. The sense of justice dies slowly in a people. They grow used to the unthinkable,and sometimes they may look back and even wonder when things changed. Theywill not find a day or a time or a place. Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learnto ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.
Charles Morgan
I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.
Alan Bennett
Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want--I want--I want--was all that she could think about--but just what this real want was she did no know.
Carson McCullers
It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.
Oscar Wilde
We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.
William Shakespeare
That is one of the great secrets of life Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love -- I scarcely dare say it -- but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?
Thornton Wilder
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.
Oscar Wilde