Quotes by Playwrights - Page 157

And after the second year was over, the Soul said to the young Fisherman at night-time, and as he sat in the wattled house alone, "Lo! now I have tempted thee with evil, and I have tempted thee with good, and thy love is stronger than I am. Wherefore will I tempt thee no longer, but I pray thee to suffer me to enter thy heart, that I may be with thee even as before.""Surely thou mayest enter," said the young Fisherman, "for in the days when with no heart thou didst go through the world thou must have suffered.""Alas!" cried his Soul, "I can find no place of entrance, so compassed about with love is this heart of thine.
Oscar Wilde
And the young Fisherman said to himself: "How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.
Oscar Wilde
The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.
Sophocles
To make the State your god is to worship an idol, for the State is a man-made creation arising naturally out of tribal communion; but the soul, if such there be, is a god-made miracle and above all national or patriotic standards – the supreme and eternal reality.
Eden Phillpotts
What victory would the Devil have to win a soul already bad? It is the best the Devil wants, and who is better than the minister." - Rev. John Hale
Arthur Miller
Under the penitential gatesSustained by staring SeraphimWhere the souls of the devoutBurn invisible and dim.
T.S Eliot
The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
Oscar Wilde
Body and soul can never be marriedI need to become who I already am and will bellow forever at this incongruity which has committed me to hell
Sarah Kane
I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.
W Somerset Maugham
They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.
Anton Chekhov
It was such an unexpected and genuine smile that if I only had a soul I'm sure I would have felt quite guilty.
Jeff Lindsay
Ada: And why life? (Pause.) Why life, Henry? (Pause.) Is there anyone about?Henry: Not a living soul.Ada: I thought as much. (Pause.) When we longed to have it to ourselves there was always someone. Now that it does not matter the place is deserted.
Samuel Beckett
The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination
George Bernard Shaw
He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.
Graham Greene
My soul, be satisfied with flowers,With fruit, with weeds even; but gather themIn the one garden you may call your own.
Edmond Rostand
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven.
William Shakespeare
So with curious eyes and sick surmiseWe watched him day by day,And wondered if each one of usWould end the self-same way,For none can tell to what red HellHis sightless soul may stray.
Oscar Wilde
To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.
Oscar Wilde
How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.
Oscar Wilde
There is no such thing as a good influence. 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 virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
Oscar Wilde
I drink to separate my body from my soul.
Oscar Wilde
I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes
My fish dream is a sex dream.
Joseph Heller
The world loves the Saint, and Christ loves the sinner.
Oscar Wilde
After Hatuey, a fifteenth-century Indian insurrectionist, had been fixed to the stake, his Spanish captors extended him the choice of converting to Christianity and ascending to Heaven of going unrepentantly to Hell. Gathering that his executioners expected to go to heaven, Hatuey chose the other
Kathy Acker
We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.
T.S Eliot
DESDEMONACome, how wouldst thou praise me? IAGO I am about it; but indeed my invention Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze; It plucks out brains and all: but my Muse labours, And thus she is deliver'd. If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit, The one's for use, the other useth it. DESDEMONA Well praised! How if she be black and witty? IAGO If she be black, and thereto have a wit, She'll find a white that shall her blackness fit. DESDEMONA Worse and worse. EMILIA How if fair and foolish? IAGO She never yet was foolish that was fair; For even her folly help'd her to an heir. DESDEMONA These are old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i' the alehouse. What miserable praise hast thou for her that's foul and foolish? IAGO There's none so foul and foolish thereunto, But does foul pranks which fair and wise ones do.
William Shakespeare
...art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.
Oscar Wilde
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. World's had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow...
Oscar Wilde
When a unicorn is slain, men have destroyed again the image of beauty that they seek.
Nicholas Stuart Gray
A right fair mark, fair coz, is soonest hit.
William Shakespeare
The beauty of shadow comes from the beauty of light!
Mehmet Murat ildan
And I thought, I am in love. For the first time I am in love. And loved. Someone loves me. And I love them. And within me things clicked and whirled like the insides of some gigantic clock, cog against wheel, spring against spiral, tick against tock, and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I had shown someone what I really was. I had shown someone my truth, my secret. Out there, beyond the walls of the Castle, there was a boy who had seen inside my chrysalis. And I would never be safe again.
Philip Ridley
All the beautiful roads are infinite because beauty gives us the feeling of infinity!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Inteligence lives longer than beauty.
Oscar Wilde
She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty.
m. somerset maugham
Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily. There is nothing in the world capable of such spontaneous up-lifting, of such speedy ennoblement; nothing that offers more scrupulous obedience to the pure and noble command it receives.
Maurice Maeterlinck
In all truth might it be said that beauty is the unique aliment of our soul, for in all places does it search for beauty, and it perishes not of hunger even in the most degraded of lives. For indeed nothing of beauty can pass by and be altogether unperceived. Perhaps does it never pass by save only in our unconsciousness, but its action is no less puissant in gloom of night than by light of day; the joy it procures may be less tangible, but other difference there is none.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Must we always be warned, and can we only fall on our knees when some one is there to tell us that God is passing by? If you have loved profoundly you have needed no one to tell you that your soul was a thing as great in itself as the world; that the stars, the flowers, the waves of night and sea were not solitary; that it was on the threshold of appearances that everything began, but nothing ended, and that the very lips you kissed belonged to a creature who was loftier, much purer, and much more beautiful than the one whom your arms enfolded.
Maurice Maeterlinck
I recognise your body in liana; your expression in the eyes of a frightened gazelle; the beauty of your face in that of the moon, your tresses in the plumage of peacocks... alas! Timid friend- no one object compares to you.
Kālidāsa
If there is ever a magical beauty that can be watched hours with great admiration, and that is the beauty of a strong light falling from the everlasting skies into the heart of the dimness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Thousands of channels there are through which the beauty of your soul may sail even unto our thoughts. Above all is there the wonderful, central channel of love.
Maurice Maeterlinck
There needs but so little to encourage beauty in our soul; so little to awaken the slumbering angels; or perhaps is there no need of awakening --- it is enough that we lull them not to sleep. It requires more effort to fall, perhaps, than to rise. Can we, without putting constraint upon ourselves, confine our thoughts to everyday things at times when the sea stretches before us, and we are face to face with the night? And what soul is there but knows that it is ever confronting the sea, ever in presence of an eternal night?
Maurice Maeterlinck
The real beauty of a house is always the happiness inside that house!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Think'st thou heaven is such a glorious thing?I tell thee, 'tis not so fair as thouOr any man that breathes on earth.
Christopher Marlowe
Nature has two powers: Her own physical power and the spiritual power of her beauty!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The sound we hear when it snows is the soft song of the white beauty!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Used to be a hobo right smart. back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I'd been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue looking and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees going by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.
Cormac McCarthy
I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.
Cormac McCarthy
Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins
Oscar Wilde
Cold were the lips, yet he kissed them. Salt was the honey of the hair, yet he tasted it with a bitter joy. He kissed the closed eyelids, and the wild spray that lay upon their cups was less salt than his tears. And to the dead thing he made confession. Into the shells of its ears he poured the harsh wine of his tale. He put the little hands round his neck, and with his fingers he touched the thin reed of the throat. Bitter, bitter was his joy, and full of strange gladness was his pain.
Oscar Wilde
What you doStill betters what is done. When you speak, sweet.I'ld have you do it ever: when you sing,I'ld have you buy and sell so, so give alms,Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs,To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish youA wave o' the sea, that you might ever doNothing but that; move still, still so,And own no other function: each your doing,So singular in each particular,Crowns what you are doing in the present deed,That all your acts are queens.
William Shakespeare
If you can add a great beauty to something which is already beautiful, then you must be very beautiful like a white swan adding beauty to a misty lake!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is rarely in the world's history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world.
Oscar Wilde
He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene's face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Every new star that is found in the sky will lend of its rays to the passions, and thoughts, and the courage, of man. Whatever of beauty we see in all that surrounds us, within us already is beautiful; whatever we find in ourselves that is great and adorable, that do we find too in others.
Maurice Maeterlinck
In the old age black was not counted fair,Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name.But now is black beauty’s successive heir,And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.For since each hand hath put on nature’s pow'r,Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face,Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bow'r,But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seemAt such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,Sland'ring creation with a false esteem.  Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,  That every tongue says beauty should look so.
William Shakespeare
I walked with my eyes on the path, but out of the corners of them I saw a man hiding behind an olive tree. He did not move as we approached, but I fell that he was watching us. As soon as we had passed I heard a scamper. Wilson, like a hunted animal, had made for safely. That was the last I ever saw of him. He died last year. He had endured that life for six years. He was found one morning on the mountainside lying quite peacefully as though he had died in his sleep. From where he lay he had been able to see those two great rocks called the Faraglioni which stand out of the sea. It was full moon and he must have gone to see them by moonlight. Perhaps he died of the beauty of that sight...---The Lotus Eater
W Somerset Maugham
BEL-IMPERIA: Oh let me go; for in my troubled eyesNow may'st thou read that life in passion dies.HORATIO: Oh stay a while, and I will die with thee;So shalt thou yield, and yet have conquered me.
Thomas Kyd