Quotes by Playwrights - Page 175

...you do not have too many boogeymen for me. You have just the right number.
Rebecca Wells
People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
Graham Greene
If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,By self-example mayst thou be denied.
William Shakespeare
Why, you are a man of heart!""Sometimes," replied Phileas Fogg, quietly. "When I have the time.
Jules Verne
Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?'The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly.Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you.'Didn't you mean them?'At the moment.
W Somerset Maugham
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
William Shakespeare
Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.
Graham Greene
A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.
Anton Chekhov
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.
Oscar Wilde
Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.
Graham Greene
The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde
You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.
Oscar Wilde
But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Graham Greene
A dame that knows the ropes isn't likely to get tied up.
Mae West
We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
T.S Eliot
Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.
Mae West
I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Oscar Wilde
Schools are made for the average. The holes are all round, and whatever shape the pegs are they must wedge in somehow. One hasn't time to bother about anything but the average.
W Somerset Maugham
Francie, huddled with other children of her kind, learned more that first day than she realized. She learned of the class system of a great Democracy.
Betty Smith
Never trust the captain who has never taken any education from the School of Storms!
Mehmet Murat ildan
They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit for them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likenesses.
Robertson Davies
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.
Oscar Wilde
Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.
Stefan Zweig
A primitive education can only create primitive generations! An outdated mentality will produce merely an outdated minds! The door of the future is closed for such archaic residuals from the pre-modern time of social evolution!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Why, then,' answered the squire, 'I am very sorry you have given him so much learning; for, if he cannot get his living by that, it will rather spoil him for anything else; and your other son, who can hardly write his name, will do more at ploughing and sowing, and is in a better condition, than he.' And indeed so it proved; for the poor lad, not finding friends to maintain him in his learning, as he had expected, and being unwilling to work, fell to drinking, though he was a very sober lad before; and in a short time, partly with grief, and partly with good liquor, fell into a consumption, and died.
Henry Fielding
Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and rights in a bathroom used by two or three other resident masters. I taught all day, but my wooden leg mercifully spared me from the nuisance of having to supervise sports after school. There were exercises to mark every night, but I soon gained a professional attitude towards these woeful explorations of the caves of ignorance and did not let them depress me. I liked the company of most of my colleagues, who were about equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.
Robertson Davies
Getting an education is an awfully wearing process!
Jean Webster
When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all.
Tom Stoppard
Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.
George Bernard Shaw
Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.
Thornton Wilder
I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination.
Howard Zinn
Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.
Howard Zinn
There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.
George Bernard Shaw
We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
Oscar Wilde
What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.
George Bernard Shaw
Spend the years of learning squanderingCourage for the years of wanderingThrough a world politely turningFrom the loutishness of learning.
Samuel Beckett
To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.
Oscar Wilde
Educated men are so impressive!
William Shakespeare
A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.
Molière
O teach me how I should forget to think (1.1.224)
William Shakespeare
Instruction does much, but encouragement everyt
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You can never be overdressed or overeducated.
Oscar Wilde
Success is far more perilous than failure, isn’t it? You’ve got to be doubly strong and watchful and wary.
Noël Coward
Failure, it occurred to him, was the secular equivalent of sin. Modern secular man was born into a world whose moral framework was composed not of laws and duties, but of tests and comparisons. There were no absolute outside standards, so standards had to generate themselves from within, relativistically. One's natural sense of inadequacy could be kept at bay only pious acts of repeated successfulness. And failure was more terrifying than sin. Sin could be repented of by an act of volition; failure could not be disposed of so easily.
Michael Frayn
Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful
Graham Greene
Anything in the world can be endured, except a series of wonderful days.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
At this rate, I'm still going to be aspiring by the time I'm expiring.
Scott Cherney
The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.
Moss Hart
On the road to success, even little stones may cause you fall down! If you are not serious and careful, forget about reaching your target!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We must thank to all the failed people in the history as they showed us the true way to success!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Why be a man when you can be a success.
Bertolt Brecht
Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions.
David Mamet
Living as we do in an age of noise and bluster, success is now measured accordingly. We must all be seen, and heard, and on the air.
Daphne du Maurier
Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressivee--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.
Tennessee Williams
Diligence is the mother of good fortune.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise
Oscar Wilde
Keep your friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent
Robert Greene