Quotes by Playwrights - Page 59

For every drop of water you waste, you must know that somewhere on earth someone is desperately looking for a drop of water!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When the water is calm, take as much distance as possible with your boat!
Mehmet Murat ildan
All water is holy water.
Rajiv Joseph
Father says hot water can be as stimulating as an alcoholic drink and though I never come by one...I can well believe it.
Dodie Smith
It wasn't like she was lonely and in fact – she had understood it all in every way except with her brain. Now she knew that she knew.
Carson McCullers
Read, so as to know; speak, so as to teach; write, so as to think!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To read is to climb the high places!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door.
Susan Hill
A man who sits under a tree and dreams makes more journey than a man who goes around the world without dreaming!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I look out over my life and see a million question marks with only a few definitive exclamation points. I'm living for the next exclamation.
Christy Hall
Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods.
Edna Ferber
Divorce is a fire exit. When a house is burning, it doesn’t matter who set the fire. If there is no fire exit, everyone in the house will be burned!
Mehmet Murat ildan
This was a respect in which he paid due homage to the wise old spirit of the late Emiel Kroger, that romantically practical Teuton who used to murmur to Pablo, between sleeping and waking, a sort of incantation that went like his: Sometimes you will find it and other times you won't find it and the times you don't find it are the times when you have got to be careful. Those are the times when you have got to remember that other times you will find it, not this time but the next time, or the time after that, and then you've got to be able to go home without it, yes, those times are the times when you have got to be able to go home without it, go home alone without it...
Tennessee Williams
I am not here to entertain straight people.
Sarah Schulman
Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
Noël Coward
The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.
W Somerset Maugham
No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him...As for the virtuous poor...they have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very poor pottage.
Oscar Wilde
...a great man who is vicious will only be a great doer of evil, and a rich man who is not liberal will be only a miserly beggar; for the possessor of wealth is not made happy by possessing it, but by spending it - and not by spending as he please but by knowing how to spend it well. To the poor gentleman there is no other way of showing that he is a gentleman than by virtue, by being affable, well-bred, courteous, gentle-mannered and helpful; not haughty, arrogant or censorious, but above all by being charitable...and no one who sees him adorned with the virtues I have mentioned, will fail to recognize and judge him, though he know him not, to be of good stock.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue.
Oscar Wilde
You say that Caesar Borgia suffered the just punishment of his crimes. He was destroyed not by his misdeeds, but by circumstances over which he had no control. His wickedness was an irrelevant accident. In this world of sin and sorrow if virtue triumphs over vice it is not because it is virtuous, but because it has better and bigger guns; if honesty prevails over double-dealing, it is not because it is honest, but because it has a stronger army more ably led; and if good overcomes evil it is not because it is good, but because it has a well-lined purse. It is well to have right on our side, but it madness to forget that unless we have might as well it will avail us nothing. We must believe that God loves men of good will, but there is no evidence to show that He will save fools from the result of their folly.
W Somerset Maugham
To be strong and true had been the most important task he had set himself since early childhood.Once, as a boy, he had tried to outstare the sun. But before he could tell whether he had really looked at it or not, changes had occurred: the blazing red ball that had been there at first began to whirl, then suddenly dimmed, till it became a cold, bluish-black, flattened disk of iron. He felt he had seen the very essence of the sun.... For a while, wherever he looked he saw the sun's pale afterimage: in the undergrowth; in the shade beneath the trees; even, when he gazed up, in every part of the sky. The truth was something too dazzling to be looked at directly. And yet, once it had come into one's field of vision, one saw patches of light in all kinds of places: the afterimages of virtue.
Yukio Mishima
There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either.
Robert Ardrey
I have pondered on the causes of a life's shipwreck. I think that our lives are worse than the mind's quality would warrant. There are many who know virtue. We know the good, we apprehend it clearly. But we can't bring it to achievement.
Euripides
We understand and recognize what is good, but we do not labor to bring it to fulfillment, some of us out of laziness, some because we put something else, some pleasure, before virtue--and there are many pleasures in life, long conversations and indolence-that pleasing vice..
Euripides
WoyzeckYes, Captain, virtue! That I haven't figured out yet. I'm just a poor guy. The likes of us are wretched in this world and the next. If we ever got to heaven, we'd have to help make the thunder.
Georg Büchner
Oskar showed that virtue emerged where it would, and the sort of churchy observance bishops called for was not a guarantee of genuine humanity in a person.
Thomas Keneally
What virtue is it that is born with us?Much less can honor be ascribed thereto,Honor is purchased by the deeds we do.Believe me, Hero, honor is not won,Until some honorable deed be done.----From “Hero and Leander, Sestiad I
Christopher Marlowe
Mischiefs feed / Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.
Ben Jonson
Riches, the dumb god that giv'st all men tongues, / That canst do nought, and yet mak'st men do all things; / The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot, / Is made worth heaven!
Ben Jonson
Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.
Charles Robert Maturin
She’s wonderful. Tell her I’ve never seen such beautiful hands. I wonder what she sees in you.”Waddington, smiling, translated the question.“She says I’m good.”“As if a woman ever loved a man for his virtue,” Kitty mocked.
W Somerset Maugham
I prefer a loose woman to a selfish one and a wanton to a fool.
W Somerset Maugham
Those are big collisions, Hally. They make for a lot of bruises. People get hurt in all that bumping, and we're sick and tired of it now. It's been going on for too long. Are we never going to get it right?...Learn to dance life like champions instead of always being just a bunch of beginners at it?
Athol Fugard
You may make love in dancing as well as sitting.
Aphra Behn
Into each dance must be packed the panic and ecstasy of her last moment of life, for underneath was death.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.
Molière
A marching army first crushes the flowers before the enemy; but even before this, it crushes its own conscience! Conscience and killing cannot be together!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Mother: What more can we be?Chris: You can be better! Once and for all you can know there's a universe of people outside and you're responsible to it, and unless you know that you threw away your son because that's how he died.
Arthur Miller
God, if he believed in Him, and his conscience, if he had one, were the only judges to whom he was answerable.
Jules Verne
We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience
Honoré de Balzac
You're not content in your position as a factory owner and a rich heiress, you don't believe in your right to it, and now you can't sleep, which, of course, is certainly better than if you were content, slept soundly, and thought everything was fine. Your insomnia is respectable; in any event, it's a good sign. In fact, for our parents such a conversation as we're having now would have been unthinkable; they didn't talk at night, they slept soundly, but we, our generation, sleep badly, are anguished, talk a lot, and keep trying to decide if we're right or not.- A Medical Case
Anton Chekhov
Don't you be worried or annoyed, Sancho, about any comments you hear, or there will never be an end to them. Keep a safe conscience and let people say what they like: trying to still gossips' tongues is like putting up doors in open fields. If the governor leaves office rich they say he's a thief, and if he leaves it poor they say he's a milksop and a fool.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Your burden is not to clear your conscienceBut to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.
T.S Eliot
Man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy (conscience) within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.
W Somerset Maugham
A standing prick hath no conscience. And if that standing prick is attached to Bruce Robertson then it hath less than no conscience. You can't afford a conscience in this life, that has become a luxury for the rich and a social ball and chain for the rest of us. Even if I wanted one, which I certainly do not, I wouldn't have the faintest idea as how to go about getting one.
Irvine Welsh
Some people just needed to be stolen from.
Eoin Colfer
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
Oscar Wilde
Anybody can be charming if they don't mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don't have a conscience. I say them.
Jeff Lindsay
RICH I’m lamenting. I’ve lost my innocence.CROMWELL You lost that some time ago. If you’ve only just noticed, it can’t have been very important to you.
Robert Bolt
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.
William Shakespeare
Clever man is a chicken; it can fly, but a little. Genius, on the other hand, is a migratory bird; it can fly at high altitudes until He disappears on the horizon!
Mehmet Murat ildan
And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.
Oscar Wilde
By the time the clever reaches the clouds, the genius is already on the stars.
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is impossible for a dove to catch a swallow, for a clever man to catch a genius.
Mehmet Murat ildan
When the wind blows, curtain steps aside; when the genius blows, the intelligent stands aside!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There are three reasons why men of genius have long hair. One is, that they forget it is growing. The second is, that they like it. The third is, that it comes cheaper; they wear it long for the same reason they wear their hats long.
Israel Zangwill
In the land of genius, the sun always shines; in the land of clever, there are many clouds!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We take unholy risks to prove we are what we cannot be. For instance, I am not even crazy.
Amiri Baraka
We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.
David Mamet
Genius tries to conquer the world with art, with songs, with words; stupid tries to conquer it with sword, with guns, with arrows!
Mehmet Murat ildan