Quotes by Playwrights - Page 16

Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.
J. C. F. von Schiller
This above all: to thine own self be true.
William Shakespeare
A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.
Robertson Davies
What's a man's first duty? The answer is brief: To be himself.
Henrik Ibsen
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Gertrude Stein
I will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Lillian Hellman
All is disgust when one leaves his own nature and does things that misfit it.
Sophocles
A rose is a rose is a rose.
Gertrude Stein
There is always a certain peace in being what one is in being that completely. The condemned man has that joy.
Ugo Betti
If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy it there.
George Bernard Shaw
What's a joy to the one is a nightmare to the other.
Bertolt Brecht
Everyone has a right to his own course of action.
Molière
There is just one life for each of us: our own.
Euripides
I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Edward Moore
The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity sluggish and indomitable as a glacier will mitigate the most violent and depress the most exalted revolution.
T.S Eliot
It is a dangerous thing to reform anyone.
Oscar Wilde
Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
George Bernard Shaw
It is not the prisoners who need reformation it is the prisons.
Oscar Wilde
When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance his colleagues generally present him with a watch.
R.C. Sherriff
Repentance is but want of power to sin.
John Dryden
The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation that away Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.
William Shakespeare
Coincidence is God's way of performing miracles anonymously.
Sophy Burnham
I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.
Mae West
Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.
George Bernard Shaw
A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.
W Somerset Maugham
There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
Seán O'Casey
Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world but you must get at a man through his own religion not through yours.
George Bernard Shaw
One's religion is whatever he is most interested in.
James M. Barrie
I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.
Luigi Pirandello
No man will be respected by others who is despised by his own relatives.
Plautus
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
Oscar Wilde
I have always found that each step we take in life is to be regretted-if we once begin to wonder how many other steps might have been possible.
John Oliver Hobbes
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw
Since luck's a nine days' wonder wait their end.
Euripides
What the reason of the ant laboriously drags into a heap the wind of accident will collect in one breath.
J. C. F. von Schiller
Luck is believing you're lucky.
Tennessee Williams
The man who glories in his luck may be overthrown by destiny.
Euripides
There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.
Euripides
Every why hath a wherefore.
William Shakespeare
I have no other but a woman's reason. I think him so because I think him so.
William Shakespeare
To get it right be born with luck or else make it.
Ruth Gordon
I like reality. It tastes of bread.
Jean Anouilh
Reason is an emotion for the sexless.
Heathcote Williams
We never enjoy perfect happiness our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.
Pierre Corneille
Do not commit the error common among the young of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.
Jan de Hartog
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
T.S Eliot
You too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today since like that of yesterday it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
Luigi Pirandello
The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition.
Oliver Goldsmith
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
He who cannot do what he wants must make do with what he can.
Terence
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
Johann von Goethe
We cannot all be masters.
William Shakespeare
Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.
Graham Greene
It isn't important to come out on top what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.
Bertolt Brecht
The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.
Johann von Goethe
I have done what I could do in life and if I could not do better I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.
Maurice Maeterlinck
No one is happy all his life long.
Euripides
When I'm good I'm very good but when I'm bad I'm better.
Mae West
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Joseph Addison