Quotes by Playwrights - Page 6

I have nothing but contempt for the kind of governor who is afraid, for whatever reason, to follow the course that he knows is best for the State.
Sophocles
Her character was like a country which on first acquaintance seems grand, but inhospitable; but in which presently you discover smiling little villages among fruit trees in the folds of the majestic mountains, and pleasant ambling rivers that flow kindly through lush meadows. But these comfortable scenes, though they surprise and even reassure you, are not enough to make you feel at home in the land of tawny heights and windswept spaces.
m. somerset maugham
Some clever and honourable nations change their regime from authoritarian to a democratic one, and some weak-kneed dictator lover miserable nations do the exact opposite! Don’t try to look for a character in a person who gave up his freedom, because he does have none!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every country is a battlefield for the struggle between honest and dishonest, between honourable and honourless people! At the end, the character of that country will be determined by whichever group wins!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You exist because the universe exists. You owe your existence to the universe. You may call the universe as god or something else, it doesn’t matter. What matters is this: Thank to it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We are unimportant creatures in this universe. We are all alone for the moment. Nobody has ever sent us any holy book or whatsoever. To survive in this universe we must first understand that nobody can help us, nobody but ourselves! To be important creatures in this universe means is to be able to shape this universe in such a way that our existence become everlasting!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Find a secret place and be unreachable! And then, in the silence of solitude, the things you cannot reach in the crowds will meet you there!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.(Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.)Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.
Samuel Beckett
It's salt. Why don't you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren't I just good enough to eat?
Grant Morrison
That, as my cousin Nord would say, is where my improvised lie falls apart.
Eoin Colfer
Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.
George Bernard Shaw
To attack terrorism, firstly attack the ignorance which is the greatest source of terrorism! Attack the ignorance worldwide because ignorance often creates sick minds!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you close your door to the world of books, the gates of the world of ignorance automatically opens and quickly pulls you inside!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To look beautiful and innocent all the time, keep your heart beautiful and innocent all the time!
Mehmet Murat ildan
But there, war does not care for predetermination; it also destroys in fury that wich is immaterial, the hopes and expectations (from Requiem for a Hotel /Nekrolog auf ein Hotel,1918)
Stefan Zweig
In old age, past haunts the present; memories replace the real life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Oscar Wilde
He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?
Cormac McCarthy
Are you comfortable? That’s good. But there is somewhere at least someone is uncomfortable! And this should somehow make you uncomfortable too! The world can be a better place only through this way, through thinking others!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Like a breakfast time or lunch time, you must have a thinking time! Without eating and thinking we cannot stick to the existence; without them we cannot stay in the port of this universe!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is impossible for me to be an Anarchist, for I do not believe in the essential goodness of man. The world, the physical world, that was once all in all to me, has at moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer at such moments make up to me at all for the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Olivia: What's a drunken man like, fool?Feste: Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman: one draught above heat makes him a fool; the second mads him; and a third drowns him.
William Shakespeare
That in the captain's but a choleric word,Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.
William Shakespeare
The more you keep your door closed, the more you will rot! Open your door! Let different ideas, different beliefs, different cultures and different attitudes flow into your mind. Anything different will help you to enlarge your little world! By opening your door, you invite the whole universe to your tiny house! Enlarge your house and enrich yourself! As long as your door remains closed, you shall continue rotting in your poor world!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You will get closer to the truths only when you start thinking this way: My religion is not the best religion, my country is not the best country, my culture is not the best culture, and my life is not the best life! The more you move away from arrogance, pride and prejudice, the more you will get closer to the truth!
Mehmet Murat ildan
HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.
George Bernard Shaw
The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.
Anton Chekhov
I dug her usage of "Spotify" as a verb.
Kara Lee Corthron
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
W Somerset Maugham
Let those who sit know that this world is not a waiting room; it is an arena to struggle, an arena for action! Let the inactive remember that we were born to act, not to sit!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To spend one's life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I'm not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?
Charles Fuller
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean — wherever my imagination ranges.
Anton Chekhov
You spoke your words as though you denied the very existence of the shadows or of evil. Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?
Mikhail Bulgakov
My hate is general, I detest all men;Some because they are wicked and do evil,Others because they tolerate the wicked,Refusing them the active vigorous scornWhich vice should stimulate in virtuous minds.
Molière
..What our contempt often hurls from us,We wish it our again; the present pleasure,By revolution lowering,does becomeThe opposite of itself..
William Shakespeare
It is always a great honor to be the driver of your own car, to be the boss of your own fate!
Mehmet Murat ildan
By walking on the right path, you create a golden fate for yourself and you also become a silver lining for the others!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow worldLike a Colossus, and we petty menWalk under his huge legs and peep aboutTo find ourselves dishonorable graves.Men at some time are masters of their fates.The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our starsBut in ourselves, that we are underlings.
William Shakespeare
Yes, movies! Look at them — All of those glamorous people — having adventures — hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves — Goody, goody! — It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island — to make a safari — to be exotic, far-off! — But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move!
Tennessee Williams
When you start your journey towards your target, walk and then rest for a while and then walk again and then rest for a while again and then walk again! Rule out the option of failure in your mind! Leave only one option available: To reach your target!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.
Antonin Artaud
JASON: 'Intended wings.' How depressing.MICHAEL: Yes. Makes them into suicides, really, the pigeons.JASON: No - no, it doesn't. It could mean the wings were 'intended' to carry them upwards, out of the darkness, but they were defective in some way, these wings, so the pigeons aren't suicidal, not at all, just badly equipped for flying. Like the rest of us.
Simon Gray
Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom?Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.
Beatrix Campbell
No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.
Elfriede Jelinek
YOUNG WOMAN: Time is altered, the years to came are alteredYou know where you will find meI, fear, I, deathI, the memory beyond reachI, the recollection of the tenderness of your handsI, the sadness of our broken lifeI will defeat "it's not my concern" with my anguish
Griselda Gambaro
There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.
Dodie Smith
If you can be very impartial in analysing your own past, then you will have a much better future!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In the New Year, never forget to thank to your past years because they enabled you to reach today! Without the stairs of the past, you cannot arrive at the future!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.
W Somerset Maugham
Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
Kindness is your best gift you can ever give to anyone in any time!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When peoples cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.
Langston Hughes
Look at every creature from the window of compassion with the eyes of love!
Mehmet Murat ildan
MOTHER TIME: Life goes by so very fast, my dears, and taking the time to reflect, even once a year, slows things down. We zoom past so many seconds, minutes, hours, killing them with the frantic way we live that it's important we take at least this one collective sigh and stop, take stock, and acknowledge our place in time before diving back into the melee. Midnight on New Year's Eve is a unique kind of magic where, just for a moment, the past and the future exist at once in the present. Whether we're aware of it or not, as we countdown together to it, we're sharing the burden of our history and committing to the promise of tomorrow.
Hillary DePiano
I hate parties.And a wedding is the biggest party of all.All the guests arrived and Orpheus is taking a shower.He's always taking a shower when the guests arrive so he doesn't have to greet them.Then I have to greet them.
Sarah Ruhl
It embarrassed her, as a child, to think that her father had fallen in love, or, if men must love, then it should have been someone else, someone dark, mysterious and profoundly clever, not an ordinary person who was impatient for no reason and cross when one was late for lunch.
Daphne du Maurier
The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
Oscar Wilde
If you want the waves to touch you softly, have a walk on the sea coasts; if you want the life to touch you softly, have a walk on the reason’s coasts, because reason is a shield that softens the strokes of life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Sometimes a strong wind blows suddenly and you leave your beloved tree without saying even goodbye, like a pale autumn leaf! This uncertainty of life makes every moment in life infinitely precious.
Mehmet Murat ildan
A sad soul needs an infinite horizon which can throw all his sorrow into the silence of the eternal emptiness!
Mehmet Murat ildan