Quotes by Playwrights - Page 26

One learns by doing the thing for though you think you know it you have no certainty until you try.
Sophocles
When we are not sure we are alive.
Graham Greene
To measure up to all that is demanded of him a man must overestimate his capacities.
Johann von Goethe
Every true genius is bound to be naive.
J. C. F. von Schiller
At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done then they begin to hope it can be done then they see it can be done-then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The empty vessel giveth a greater sound than the full barrel.
John Lyly
The little I know I owe to my ignorance.
Sacha Guitry
It is a blind goose that cometh to the fox's sermon.
John Lyly
Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.
George Bernard Shaw
Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.
J.B. Priestley
I hope you have not been leading a double life pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
Oscar Wilde
For parlour use the vague generality is a lifesaver.
George Ade
You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you cannot put an idea up against a barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.
Seán O'Casey
Great ideas are not charitable.
Henry de Montherlant
There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.
Oscar Wilde
You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty.
Sacha Guitry
The love of truth lies at the root of much humour.
Robertson Davies
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
William Shakespeare
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
Honoré de Balzac
Men are April when they woo December when they wed.
William Shakespeare
A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it never in the tongue Of him that makes it.
William Shakespeare
I am a man I count nothing human foreign to me.
Terence
I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice but I found when I tried to put it in practice not only that other people were seldom lovable but that I was not very lovable myself.
George Bernard Shaw
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them but to be indifferent to them that's the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw
I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.
Luigi Pirandello
There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good nature or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. For this reason mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity which is what we express by the word Good Breeding.
Joseph Addison
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!
William Shakespeare
For 't is always fair weather When good fellows get together With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear.
Richard Hovey
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
Václav Havel
Hope is a light diet but very stimulating.
Honoré de Balzac
Hope like the gleaming taper's light adorns and cheers our way And still as darker grows the night emits a lighter ray.
Oliver Goldsmith
True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings Kings it makes Gods and meaner creatures kings.
William Shakespeare
Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes.
Euripides
Have hope. Though clouds environs now And gladness hides her face in scorn Put thou the shadow from thy brow - No night but hath its morn.
J. C. F. von Schiller
Hope is brightest when it dawns from fears.
Sir Walter Scott
While there's life there's hope.
Terence
Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.
Johann von Goethe
There are no hopeless situations there are only men who have grown hopeless about them.
Clare Boothe Luce
The miserable have no medicine but hope.
William Shakespeare
Ay sir to be honest as this world goes is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
William Shakespeare
For Brutus is an honourable man So are they all all honourable men.
William Shakespeare
Honour pricks me on. Yea but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word.
William Shakespeare
It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard
Every man has his fault and honesty is his.
William Shakespeare
Honesty is the best policy.
Miguel de Cervantes
Man is an abyss and I turn giddy when I look down into it.
Georg Büchner
People are too durable that's their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves they last too long.
Bertolt Brecht
Man's most valuable trait Is a judicious sense of what not to believe.
Euripides
Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither ripeness is all.
William Shakespeare
Every man in the world is better than someolne else and not as good as someone else.
William Saroyan
God made him and therefore let him pass for a man.
William Shakespeare
I am a man nothing human is alien to me.
Terence
The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.
T.S Eliot
The world's history is constant like the laws of nature and simple like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results.
Friedrich von Schiller
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.
George Bernard Shaw
Martyrdom - the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw
With him for a sire and her for a dam What should I be but just what I am?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Noble fathers have noble children.
Euripides
He's a chip o' th' old block.
William Rowley