Quotes by Playwrights - Page 68

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.
Jules Verne
It may have been quixotic, but it was magnificent.
J.M. Barrie
To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
Oscar Wilde
He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had left for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.
Carson McCullers
If only you would go to the university," he said. "Only enlightened and holy people are interesting, it's only they who are wanted. The more of such people there are, the sooner the Kingdom of God will come on earth. Of your town then not one stone will be left, everything will he blown up from the foundations, everything will be changed as though by magic. And then there will be immense, magnificent houses here, wonderful gardens, marvellous fountains, remarkable people.... But that's not what matters most. What matters most is that the crowd, in our sense of the word, in the sense in which it exists now -- that evil will not exist then, because every man will believe and every man will know what he is living for and no one will seek moral support in the crowd. Dear Nadya, darling girl, go away! Show them all that you are sick of this stagnant, grey, sinful life. Prove it to yourself at least!
Anton Chekhov
And why, she began to ask, did she rage against individuals? Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them. They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the Superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, was unembittered laughter.
Sinclair Lewis
So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man, or something else to spoil your effects?""Yes, naturally.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
Oscar Wilde
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,It isn't just one of your holiday games;You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatterWhen I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,Such as Victor or Jonathan, or George or Bill Bailey -All of them sensible everyday names.There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter -But all of them sensible everyday names.But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum -Names that never belong to more than one cat.But above and beyond there's still one name left over,And that is the name that you never will guess;The name that no human research can discover -But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.When you notice a cat in profound meditation,The reason, I tell you, is always the same:His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplationOf the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:His ineffable effableEffanineffableDeep and inscrutable singular Name.
T.S Eliot
The things that make me different are the things that make me.
A.A. Milne
The well bred contradict other people. the wise contradict themselves.
Oscar Wilde
If you are a sparrow, don’t attack the eagle; be wise! If you are an eagle, don’t attack the sparrow; be just!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart.
Friedrich Schiller
All the quiet corners of the world are the great temples for the wise and for the wisdom!
Mehmet Murat ildan
How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?
George Bernard Shaw
Library: The Temple of the Wise!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The wisest men follow their own direction.
Euripides
I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant
William Saroyan
Then must you speakOf one that loved not wisely but too well,Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought,Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,Like the base Indian, threw a pearl awayRicher than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,Albeit unused to the melting mood,Drop tears as fast as the Arabian treesTheir medicinable gum. Set you down this,And say besides that in Aleppo once,Where a malignant and a turbaned TurkBeat a Venetian and traduced the state,I took by th' throat the circumcised dogAnd smote him thus.
William Shakespeare
What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.
George Bernard Shaw
We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.
Anna Deavere Smith
Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.
Anton Chekhov
I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.
Oscar Wilde
Fire is one of our best friends in this cold universe. Put some wood in it to show your gratitude.
Mehmet Murat ildan
The fire which seems extinguished often slumbers beneath the ashes.
Pierre Corneille
If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy fit of anger over some word I might have said without the perfect sweetness that works on her like a charm, if ever the magic Mare looks over her shoulder and whinnies: “So! You don’t love me!” and bucks me off, sends me flying to the hyenas, if ever the paper ladder that I climb so easily to go pick stars for Promethea—at the very instant that I reach out my hand and it smells like fresh new moon, so good, it makes you believe in god’s genius—if ever at that very instant my ladder catches fire—because it is so fragile, all it would take is someone’s brushing against it tactlessly and all that would be left is ashes—if ever I had the dreadful luck again to find myself falling screaming down into the cruel guts of separation, and emptying all my being of hope, down to the last milligram of hope, until I am able to melt into the pure blackness of the abyss and be no more than night and a death rattle,I would really rather not be tumbling around without my pencil and paper.
Hélène Cixous
The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.
Cormac McCarthy
I love you so much I could burst into flames.
Philip Ridley
In the draws the smoke coming off the ground like mist and the thin black trees burning on the slopes like heathen candles.
Cormac McCarthy
For the fire consumes all but the arsonist.
Wole Soyinka
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
Tennessee Williams
The dove descending breaks the airWith flame of incandescent terrorOf which the tongues declareThe one discharge from sin and error.The only hope, or else despairLies in the choice of pyre or pyre-To be redeemed from fire by fire.Who then devised the torment? Love.Love is the unfamiliar NameBehind the hands that woveThe intolerable shirt of flameWhich human power cannot remove.We only live, only suspireConsumed by either fire or fire.
T.S Eliot
I believe you!' the artiste exclaimed finally and extinguishes his gaze. 'I do! These eyes are not lying! How many times have I told you that your basic error consists in underestimating the significance of the human eye. Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes - never! A sudden question is put to you, you don't even flinch, in one second you get hold of yourself and know what you must say to conceal the truth, and you speak quite convincingly, and not a wrinkle on your face moves, but - alas - the truth which the question stirs up from the bottom of your soul leaps momentarily into your eyes, and it's all over! They see it, and you're caught!
Mikhail Bulgakov
A black boy brought Wilson's gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: 'Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love...' His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he has his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog's eyes, a setter's eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.
Graham Greene
Beshrew your eyes,They have o'erlook'd me and divided me;One half of me is yours, the other half yours,Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,And so all yours.
William Shakespeare
It’s the body and eyes that tell what a person is thinking or going to do.
Louis Nowra
Reflection is a good reminder of the truth! You may turn your eyes away from the truths, but the reflections will remind them to you! And anything which describes a truth well is a reflection of that truth! Turn your eyes away from the Moon, then the lake will remind the Moon to you, the shadows of the wolves howling against the Moon will remind the truth to you, even in the eyes of a frog, you shall see the Moon! Thus, if you turn your face away from the truth, it will never work! Because the reminders of truth are everywhere and they are as strong as the truth itself!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In life moments arrive where the mouth becomes tongueless and the eyes become tongue!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgements,And should give certain judgement what they see;But they are rash sometimes, and tell us wondersOf common things, which when our judgments find,They can then check the eyes, and call them blind.
Thomas Middleton
If you close your eyes, no lighthouse can help you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Need we go into details about what I said to Judy? I am no poet, and I suppose what I said was very much what everybody always says, and although I remember her as speaking golden words, I cannot recall precisely anything she said. If love is to be watched and listened to without embarrassment, it must be transmuted into art, and I don't know how to do that, and it is not what I have come to Zurich to learn.
Robertson Davies
Farewell, ungrateful traitor, Farewell, my perjured swain;Let never injured creature Believe a man again.The pleasure of possessingSurpasses all expressing,But 'tis too short a blessing, And love too long a pain.'Tis easy to deceive us In pity of your pain;But when we love you leave us To rail at you in vain.Before we have descried itThere is no bliss beside it,But she that once has tried it Will never love again.The passion we pretended Was only to obtain,But when the charm is ended The charmer you disdain.Your love by ours we measureTill we have lost our treasure,But dying is a pleasure When living is a pain.
John Dryden
When Hamid dropped Lata off at her house at nine that night, he felt hollow. The touch of her soft body was sheared from him like bark from a tree, and he spent the entire night tossing and turning.
Saadat Hasan Manto
Miss B. says, "It's a mama's faith what keeps her children right. I'm not talkin' 'bout the churchgoin' kind, neither. Miss Mabel's got faith in goodness. Tell me you can't help but believe in it too just by lookin' at her.
Ami McKay
Never wish the death of anyone or you will lose your goodness inside you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
In matters of goodness, never expect any compliment or appreciation; just do your goodness and disappear!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The goodness you do when you are very happy is not as valuable as the goodness you do when you are very unhappy!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Visit the port of goodness often; if you can, cast your anchor over there!
Mehmet Murat ildan
She learns a valuable lesson: if you think you are good, just try doing good. You’ll soon find out how inadequate your little drop of goodness is.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
Doing goodness is good only when you don’t expect anything in return; not a medal, not even a simple thanking!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For a water drop, the most beautiful house is a leaf; and for a man: The goodness! Let the goodness be your home you permanently live in!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Benevolence is often very peremptory.
W Somerset Maugham
Doing goodness, but doing goodness only is the best and the most superior religion of all the times!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.
William Shakespeare
The goodness you do might fail; but keep doing it, because the real failure is never doing goodness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?
Jean-Paul Sartre
National hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It was not for the piano-tuner to know that in this still, grey, winter-gripped dining-room, this apparent mortuary of desire and passion (in which the lift rumbled and knives and forks scraped upon plates), waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred!
Patrick Hamilton
The old sporadic fanaticism of religious hatred had been skillfully perverted into the cold, steady fanaticism of national hate.
Franz Werfel
I've been at some pains to tell you about myself because among other reasons I think we should know who our enemies are. I've known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred of phantoms and they were not happy people.
Cormac McCarthy