Quotes by Playwrights - Page 37

Brevity is the soul of wit.
William Shakespeare
Cost little less than new before they're ended.
Colley Cibber
None but the brave deserves the fair.
John Dryden
I know on which side my bread is buttered.
John Heywood
Better is half a loaf than no bread.
John Heywood
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
William Shakespeare
Neither a borrower nor a lender be: For loan oft loses both itself and friend And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
William Shakespeare
Peace is not only better than war but infinitely more arduous.
George Bernard Shaw
A man can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days.
Johann von Goethe
Any idiot can face a crisis-it's day to day living that wears you out.
Anton Chekhov
O wad some power the giftie gie us to see some people before they see us.
Ethel Watts Mumford
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Jean Cocteau
The central theme of the novel is that they were glad to see each other.
Gertrude Stein
A stout heart breaks bad luck.
Miguel de Cervantes
My notion of a wife at forty is that a man should be able to change her like a banknote for two twenties.
Douglas Jerrold
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
T.S Eliot
Every great man nowadays has his disciples and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
Oscar Wilde
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Miguel de Cervantes
In my beginning is my end.
T.S Eliot
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs Being purged a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes Being vex'd a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears: What is it else? a madness most discreet A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
William Shakespeare
She deceiving I believing What need lovers wish for more?
Sir Charles Sedley
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other.
W Somerset Maugham
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
Honoré de Balzac
The bee that hath honey in her mouth hath a sting in her tail.
John Lyly
Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.
W Somerset Maugham
Things are beautiful if you love them.
Jean Anouilh
Something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.
W Somerset Maugham
Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die.
Ben Jonson
I'm tired of all the nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want - an adorable pancreas?
Jean Kerr
Love the sea? I dote upon it - from the beach.
Douglas Jerrold
And all the loveliest things there be Come simply so it seems to me.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.
Oscar Wilde
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Miguel de Cervantes
Art hath an enemy called ignorance.
Ben Jonson
Art is difficult transient is her reward.
Friedrich von Schiller
The object of art is to give life a shape.
Jean Anouilh
Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
Oscar Wilde
When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.
Oscar Wilde
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
George Bernard Shaw
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
Pierre Beaumarchais
The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
George Bernard Shaw
Arguments out of a petty mouth are unanswerable.
Joseph Addison
Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
All that glisters is not gold.
Miguel de Cervantes
Handsome is that handsome does.
Henry Fielding
We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck and ask anyone the house is never burgled and the ship never goes down.
Jean Anouilh
For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation.
Thornton Wilder
Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.
William Congreve
Fear of death is worse than dying.
J. C. F. von Schiller
The future is called "perhaps " which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.
Tennessee Williams
To tremble before anticipated evils is to bemoan what thou hast never lost.
Johann von Goethe
Only man clogs his happiness with care destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
John Dryden
I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.
August Strindberg
You have now learned to see That cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind.
T.S Eliot
Beware the fury of a patient man.
John Dryden
Heav'n has no rage like love to hatred turn'd Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorn'd.
William Congreve
America is God's crucible the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!... The Real American has not yet arived. He is only in the crucible Itell you - he will be the fusion of all races the common superman.
Israel Zangwill
It's my rule never to lose my temper until it would be detrimental to keep it.
Seán O'Casey
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
Gertrude Stein