Quotes by Playwrights - Page 156

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Jean Cocteau
A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
Oscar Wilde
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Oscar Wilde
every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
Oscar Wilde
God and other artists are always a little obscure.....
Oscar Wilde
It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.
Tennessee Williams
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau
Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art
Oscar Wilde
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
Oscar Wilde
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
Maxim Gorky
If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.
Friedrich Schiller
What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
Oscar Wilde
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
Peter Shaffer
Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.""I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.
Oscar Wilde
When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money
Oscar Wilde
Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturnAnd broils roots out the work of masonry,Nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till judgement that yourself arise,You in this, and dwell in lovers eyes.
William Shakespeare
The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.
Maxim Gorky
An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
Oscar Wilde
Art is science made clear.
Jean Cocteau
Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
Oscar Wilde
You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
Thomas Bernhard
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.
Federico García Lorca
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
Oscar Wilde
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Oscar Wilde
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.
Anton Chekhov
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Oscar Wilde
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
Oscar Wilde
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Oscar Wilde
Whatever his weight in pounds and ounces, he always seems bigger because of his bounces.
A.A. Milne
If a leader wants his people to do something, he himself must firstly do it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.
Alan Bennett
All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to break tyranny.
Noël Coward
Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
the condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
Thornton Wilder
Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa's souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go? How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Disappointments are to the soul what a thunderstorm is to the air.
Friedrich Schiller
And how delightful other people's emotions were!-much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends-those were the fascinating things in life.
Oscar Wilde
I will take your heart.I will take your soul out of your bodyAs though I were God.I will not be satisfiedWith the little words you say to me.I will not be satisfiedWith the touch of your handNor the sweet of your lips alone.I will take your heart for mine.I will take your soul.I will be God when it comes to you.
Langston Hughes
Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore. It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit, like Galileo’s finger in the church of Santa Croce, but Edison’s last breath is an invisible relic.
Elizabeth Alexander
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
Oscar Wilde
Our mind is our soul and we do not have any other soul. The concept of soul has been invented by ourselves to ease our fear of death.
Mehmet Murat ildan
As gold and silver are weighed in pure water, so does the soul test its weight in silence, and the words that we let fall have no meaning apart from the silence that wraps them round.
Maurice Maeterlinck
And it is because we all of us know of this sombre power and its perilous manifestations, that we stand in so deep a dread of silence. We can bear, when need must be, the silence of ourselves, that of isolation: but the silence of many - silence multiplied - and above all the silence of a crowd - these are supernatural burdens, whose inexplicable weight brings dread to the mightiest soul.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Death has come and atoned for all. I have no grievance against the soul of the man before me. Instinctively do I recognise that it soars high above the gravest faults and the cruellest wrongs (and how admirable and full of significance is this instinct!). If there linger still a regret within me, it is not that I am unable to inflict suffering in my turn, but it is perhaps that my love was not great enough and that my forgiveness has come too late. …
Maurice Maeterlinck
If I tell some one that I love him – as I may have told a hundred others – my words will convey nothing to him; but the silence which will ensue, if I do indeed love him, will make clear in what depths lie the roots of my love, and will in its turn give birth to a conviction, that shall itself be silent; and in the course of a lifetime, this silence and this conviction will never again be the same. …
Maurice Maeterlinck
It is a thing that knows no limit, and before it all men are equal; and the silence of king or slave, in presence of death, or grief, or love, reveals the same features, hides beneath its impenetrable mantle the self-same treasure. For this is the essential silence of our soul, our most inviolable sanctuary, and its secret can never be lost;
Maurice Maeterlinck
It is the disaster of our entire existence that we live thus away from our soul, and stand in such dread of its slightest movement. Did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should be already living an eternal life. We have only to think for an instant how much it succeeds in accomplishing during those rare moments when we knock off its chains – for it is our custom to enchain it as though it were distraught – what it does in love, for instance, for there we do permit it at times to approach the lattices of external life.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Be good at the depth of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man.
Maurice Maeterlinck
This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched.
Maurice Maeterlinck
May it not be the supreme aim of life thus to bring to birth the inexplicable within ourselves; and do we know how much we add to ourselves when we awake something of the incomprehensible that slumbers in every corner? Here you have awakened love which will not fall asleep again. … nothing can ever separate two souls which, for an instant, ‘have been good together.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this there can be no nobler aim in life. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other.
Maurice Maeterlinck
To love thus is to love according to the soul; and there is no soul that does not respond to this love. For the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back, and never has it to be summoned twice to the nuptial feast.
Maurice Maeterlinck
To love one’s neighbour in the immovable depths means to love in others that which is eternal; for one’s neighbour, in the truest sense of the term, is that which approaches the nearest to God; in other words, all that is best and purest in man; and it is only by ever lingering near the gates I spoke of, that you can discover the divine in the soul.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Look upon men and things with the inner eye, with its form and desire, never forgetting that the shadow they throw as they pass by, upon hillock or wall, is but the fleeting image of a mightier shadow, which, like the wing of an imperishable swan, floats over every soul that draws near to their soul. Do not believe that thoughts such as these can be mere ornaments, and without influence upon the lives of those who admit them. It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord.
Maurice Maeterlinck
He who has lived and thought can't helpdespising people in his soul;him who has felt disturbs the ghost of irrecoverable days;for him there are no more enchantments;him does the snake of memories,him does repentance bite.
Alexander Pushkin
Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.
Oscar Wilde
The soul might be silent but the servant of the soul has always got a voice and it has got one for a reason.
Cormac McCarthy