Quotes by Playwrights - Page 168

Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, "I've had enough of this.
Arnold Bennett
Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.
Samuel Beckett
Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners.
William Shakespeare
The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.
Samuel Beckett
Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The key to a happy life is to have accomplishments to be proud of and purpose to look forward to, and at the moment I had both. How wonderful it was to be me.
Jeff Lindsay
Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Laws of silence don’t work…. When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.
Tennessee Williams
You face an audience and prepare to speak. Fear will be there, if you're alive. There is, of course, no shortage of feeling up there. It is an extreme act, unusual, testing you in unparalleled ways. It speaks to the core of who you are, and why you do what you do. These challenges, they exist in life and become acute on stage.
Richard Maxwell
She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.
Graham Greene
Perhaps terror and peace became the same thing when life's mysteries were unveiled. In the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna reveals his divine form at Arjuna's request, Arjuna is terrified at seeing what no mortal can stand to see. But the end to human doubt surely must also bring with it a definite, final peace.
Padma Viswanathan
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;This sensible warm motion to becomeA kneaded clod; and the delighted spiritTo bathe in fiery floods, or to resideIn thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,And blown with restless violence round aboutThe pendent world; or to be worse than worstOf those that lawless and incertain thoughtImagine howling: 'tis too horrible!The weariest and most loathed worldly lifeThat age, ache, penury and imprisonmentCan lay on nature is a paradiseTo what we fear of death.
William Shakespeare
One of the most stupid things in life is not to enter the door which is wide open just because of the fear that this door will be shut and going back will be impossible! Have some courage, because even a harvest mouse leaves his hole to discover new places!
Mehmet Murat ildan
My heart's a dance of fear.
Aeschylus
The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times.
Wole Soyinka
The ugliest government is the one which is spreading fear to its own people! The finest government is the one which encourages its own people to criticize the government harshly.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Defeat begins with the fear that one had lost.
Kōbō Abe
The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.
Samuel Beckett
Do not let me hearOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
T.S Eliot
The backward look behind the assuranceOf recorded history, the backward half-lookOver the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
T.S Eliot
For those who challenge the great dangers fearlessly, let us remind this realistic probability: Fear can save your life and courage may kill you; thus sometimes fear is a reasonable path to continue your path!
Mehmet Murat ildan
O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?And shall I couple Hell?
William Shakespeare
I could a tale unfold whose lightest wordWould harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,Thy knotted and combined locks to part,And each particular hair to stand on endLike quills upon the fretful porpentine.But this eternal blazon must not beTo ears of flesh and blood.List, list, O list!
William Shakespeare
Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.
Howard Zinn
The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.
Catherine Crowe
I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.
Robertson Davies
Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Honoré de Balzac
What is it?Nothing. I had a bad dream.What did you dream about?Nothing.Are you okay?No.He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said.I was crying. But you didnt wake up.I'm sorry. I was just so tired.I meant in the dream.
Cormac McCarthy
Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who love love?.. Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or to be touched?
Eugene O'Neill
It will seem to many persons very inconsistent with their ideas of the dignity of a spirit that they should appear and act in the manner I have described, and shall describe further; and I have heard it objected that we cannot suppose God would permit the dead to return merely to frighten the living, and that it is showing Him little reverence to imagine He would suffer them to come on such trifling errands, or demean themselves in so undignified a fashion. But God permits men of all degrees of wickedness, and of every kind of absurdity, to exist, and to harass and disturb the earth, whilst they expose themselves to its obloquy or its ridicule.
Catherine Crowe
Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
Graham Greene
Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.
Sophocles
Give into love or live in fear.
Jonathan Larson
Screw your courage to the sticking-place
William Shakespeare
The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.
Daphne du Maurier
If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.
George Bernard Shaw
At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.
Rebecca Wells
There is always danger for those who are afraid.
George Bernard Shaw
Boredom is a pleasing antidote for fear
Daphne du Maurier
My heart always timidly hides itself behind my mind. I set out to bring down stars from the sky, then, for fear of ridicule, I stop and pick little flowers of eloquence.
Edmond Rostand
Do I dare Disturb the universe?
T.S Eliot
We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion as it had before.
Daphne du Maurier
The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In time we hate that which we often fear.
William Shakespeare
Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.
Emma Donoghue
That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?
Peter Shaffer
The Imperial Concubine was fully aware of her own beauty, and she tended to be attracted by any force, such as religion, that treated her beauty and her high rank as things of no value.
Yukio Mishima
The only real flesh was the flesh that existed in his imagination. Since, therefore, he regarded the flesh as an ideal abstraction, rather than as a physical fact, he had relied on his spiritual strength to subjugate it.
Yukio Mishima
If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.
Grant Morrison
The reason that you are blessed in excess with anything is so that you can give it away to someone else in need.
Dee Dee M. Scott
There is no error more absurd, and yet more rooted in the heart of man, than the belief that his sufferings will promote his spiritual safety.
Charles Robert Maturin
May the life I live speak for me, not my religion or denomination title.
Dee Dee M. Scott
The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
T.S Eliot
Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance
T.S Eliot
The sea is only the embodiment of asupernatural and wonderful existence.It is nothing but love and emotionit is the ‘Living Infinite...
Jules Verne
When this book is mould,And a book of manyWaiting to be soldFor a casual penny,In a little open case,In a street unclean and cluttered,Where a heavy mud is spatteredFrom the passing drays,Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters, findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!
Edna St. Vincent Millay
If you have carefully examined hundred people you met in your life journey, it means that you have read hundred different books! Every person you know is a book; world is full of walking books; some are boring, some are marvellous, some are weak, some are powerful, but they are all useful because they all carry different experiences of different paths!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Some looks are heavier than the thickest books because they carry the saddest stories of life!
Mehmet Murat ildan