Quotes by Playwrights - Page 176

When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity... you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others
Robert Greene
We are all failures- at least the best of us are.
J.M. Barrie
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
George Bernard Shaw
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Oliver Goldsmith
He feared at certain moments that the only new knowledge he would take away from this country was learning how to swim and use the telephone.
Damon Galgut
Come on then, I will swear to study soTo know the thing I am forbid to know- Berowne
William Shakespeare
Still, for long the love of science triumphed over all other feelings. He became an artist deeply impressed by the marvels of art, a philosopher to whom no one of the higher sciences was unknown, a statesman versed in the policy of European courts. To the eyes of those who observed him superficially he might have passed for one of those cosmopolitans, curious of knowledge, but disdaining action; one of those opulent travelers, haughty and cynical, who move incessantly from place to place, and are of no country.
Jules Verne
Blount sat down to the table and leaned over close to Singer. "There are those who know and those who don't know. And for every ten thousand who don't know there's only one who knows. That's the miracle of all time - the fact that these millions know so much but don't know this. It's like in the fifteenth century when everybody believed the world was flat and only Columbus and a few other fellows knew the truth. But it's different in that it took talent to figure that the earth is round. While the truth is so obvious it's a miracle of all history that people don't know.
Carson McCullers
Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man.
Robertson Davies
Dear Miss Pomeroy, I am saddened by the things I do not know. There are hundreds--thousands--of books in the world and I will never be able to read all of them.I am old.Walter
Barbara Wersba
For I believe that part of knowledge is its desire to show itself and its refusal to put up with a merely hidden existence. I find mute knowledge dangerous, for it grows ever more mute and ultimately secret, and must then avenge itself for being secret.
Elias Canetti
We pimp our precious lives to the infernal gnashing babble - Follow me! Friend me! Like me! But don't ever know me.
Patrick Marber
Knowledge is not always power.
Kara Lee Corthron
Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries—Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Café Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Café Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.
Stefan Zweig
The worn soles of Daffy's boots skidded on the icy stones. He'd been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he'd come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal.
Emma Donoghue
The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.
Oscar Wilde
You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.
John Logan
For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.
Carson McCullers
...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.
Alan Bennett
Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.
Graham Greene
Those swift to think are not always secure.
Sophocles
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.
Friedrich Schiller
Modest doubt is call'd the beacon of the wise.
William Shakespeare
Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.
Robertson Davies
It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.
Tom Stoppard
Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!
Tom Stoppard
I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard Shaw
When I was your age, art was a lonely thing: no galleries, no collecting, no critics, no money. We didn't have mentors. We didn't have parents. We were alone. But it was a great time, because we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.
John Logan
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.
George Bernard Shaw
If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.
Tom Stoppard
Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
T.S Eliot
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Alas, how terrible is wisdomwhen it brings no profit to the man that's wise!This I knew well, but had forgotten it,else I would not have come here.
Sophocles
These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
Anton Chekhov
What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.
Yukio Mishima
nothing that is worth knowing can be taught
Oscar Wilde
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
Cormac McCarthy
You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the … appalling … strangeness of the mercy of God.
Graham Greene
...Hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer, “Make me a healthy animal.” But here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, “the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on...
George Bernard Shaw
For what is truth? In matters of relogion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.
Oscar Wilde
For what is truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood.
Oscar Wilde
The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
George Bernard Shaw
In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives. Certainly that cast of mind had some of its origin in our pit, which had much the character of a Protestant Hell. I was probably the most entranced listener to a sermon the Reverend Andrew Bowyer preached about Gehenna, the hateful valley outside the walls of Jerusalem, where outcasts lived, and where their flickering fires, seen from the city walls, may have given rise to the idea of a hell of perpetual burning. He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason then why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.
Robertson Davies
I'm a religious man," he said. "I don't believe in a particularGod, but even so one can have a faith, something beyondthe limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element ofbuilt-in faith, although it claims to be a science and notmerely an ideology. This is my first visit to the West: untilnow I have only been able to go to the Soviet Union orPoland or the Baltic states. In your country I see anabundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. Butthere's a difference between our countries that is also asimilarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has differentfaces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we don'thave the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not need to fight for yoursurvival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension, andI would not want to exchange that for your abundance.
Henning Mankell
Religion is not a bridge between God and Man it is the Great Wall of China between them!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Time will come and some people will be proud of themselves that they have never believed in any religion! This honour will be belonging to the clever people of the society only! For the others, merely the deep shame will remain!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Petronius says that ‘Mundus vult decipi - The world wants to be deceived.’ That is very true, otherwise there wouldn’t exist any religion!
Mehmet Murat ildan
La religion n'est pas un pont entre Dieu et l'homme, c'est une Grande Muraille de Chine entre eux!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Religion now has degenerated and it has turned into a wolf; it has opened its mouth to show his ugly teeth; its spreading fear instead of love; and science has hidden in a corner like a lamb, trembling with fear!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To quit religion is to start walking in the space! Don’t be afraid, you don’t fall into the void, because you can hold onto God and science!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen..
T.S Eliot
Religion is the servant of the vanishing; science, of the existence! Disappearance belongs to the chaos and the Devil; existence, to the God!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For God’s sake, take the religion out of your life or all kind of absurdities will take the reason out of your life! Keep God, get rid of religion! God, Love and Science; the Magnificent Trinity! All you need is these three things!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Our lord is a magic lord as we all desired, and magical things have sought him from over there, and they all obey his hests.""It is so," said all but Gazic. And Gazic rose up in a pause of their gladness. "Many strange things," he said, "have entered our village, coming from over there. And it may be that human folk are best, and the ways of the fields we know.
Lord Dunsany
But you do believe, don’t you," Rose implored him, "you think it’s true?"t"Of course it’s true," the Boy said. "What else could there be?" he went scornfully on. "Why," he said, "it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing. Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, "torments." "And Heaven too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on. "Oh, maybe," the Boy said, "maybe.
Graham Greene
Religion has a way of making people into idiots is what my father says.
Victor Lodato
I shouldn't be surprised. Catholicism is the ultimate loophole religion (sin, confess, repeat), so it makes sense that a priest would know better than anyone how to work the angles. Still, when you go to confession and say, "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," you don't expect him to say, "So, who hasn't?
Marc Acito