Quotes by Playwrights - Page 7

It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls

Aristophanes

What can a little town teach you? It can teach you how a little place already contains the whole features of the entire world!

Mehmet Murat ildan

The problem with all students, he said, is that they inevitably stop somewhere. They hear an idea and they hold on to it until it becomes dead; they want to flatter themselves that they know the truth. But true Zen never stops, never congeals into such truths. That is why everyone must constantly be pushed to the abyss, starting over and feeling their utter worthlessness as a student. Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on clichés and stay there, until the spirit dies as well. Not even enlightenment is enough. You must continually start over and challenge yourself.

Robert Greene

Gulliver was soon being read "from the cabinet council to the nursery".

John Gay

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

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.

Peter Weiss

When they got to their hotel she went straight up to bed, but he paused to get a drink. There was, in the vestibule, a flower stall and he bought a handful of roses, stiffly wired into a bouquet, before proceeding to the oppressive gorgeousness of their bridal suite. The lift was lined with looking glass, so that as he shot upwards he got an endlessly duplicated version of himself, stout and nervous, a light cloak flung over his shoulder and flowers in his hand: an infinitely long row of gentlemen carrying offerings to an unforgiving past.

Margaret Kennedy

In his business, he observed human nature and came to certain conclusions about it. The conclusions lacked wisdom and originality; in fact, they were tiresome. But they were important to McGarrity because he had figured them out for himself. In the first years of their marriage, he had tried to tell Mae about these conclusions, but all she said was, "I can imagine." Sometimes she varied by saying, "I can just imagine." Gradually then, because he could not share his inner self with her, he lost the power of being a husband to her, and she was unfaithful to him.

Betty Smith

His mind was betraying him. Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing slowly from their sleep.

Cormac McCarthy

We have invented the literature because the reality wasn’t imaginative enough and we also wanted to be alone, at least for a while!

Mehmet Murat ildan

It is ever true that he who does nothing for others, does nothing for himself.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

Jean Genet

My words fly up my thoughts remain below Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.

Yukio Mishima

In school, I hated poetry - those skinny,Malnourished poems that professors love;The bad grammar and dirty words that catchIn the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech.Pablo, your words are rain I run through,Grass I sleep in.

George Elliott Clarke

I can't tell you why God made you the way you are any more than I can tell you why he's planted a carcinoma in my stomach to make me die painfully while other men die peacefully in their sleep. The cogs of creation seem to slip all the time. Babies are born with two heads, mothers of families run crazy with carving knives, men die in plague, famine and thunderstorms. Why? Only God knows.

Morris West

Though sleep is called our best friend, it is a friend who often keeps us waiting!

Jules Verne

If you want to do something do it!

Plautus

Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.

Lorraine Hansberry

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!

Tennessee Williams

Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In the yard of the inn, Daffy Cadwaladyr introduced himself. "Short for Davyd," he said pleasantly.The Londoner looked as if she'd never heard a sillier name in her life.

Emma Donoghue

Once you get people laughing they're listening and you can tell them almost anything.

Herb Gardner

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Honoré de Balzac

My soul is in the sky.

William Shakespeare

I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought.

Samuel Beckett

Any idiot can face a crisis-it's day to day living that wears you out.

Anton Chekhov

The body is the garden of the soul.

Tony Kushner

They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.

Oscar Wilde

When the winter comes, the summer shines infinitely in our hearts!

Mehmet Murat ildan

It is always betterto avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end. Let whoever canwin glory before death. When a warrior is gone,that will be his best and only bulwark.

Seamus Heaney

The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.

William Shakespeare

MOLLY: You don't like New Years Eve? Are you insane? It's literally the best holiday ever. You just party all night and it doesn't matter what stupid stuff you do because the year's over and you get a brand new start in the morning.

Hillary DePiano

No day is an ordinary day; all days are extraordinary, because life itself is extraordinary!

Mehmet Murat ildan

This rough magicI here abjure, and, when I have requiredSome heavenly music, which even now I do,To work mine end upon their senses thatThis airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,And deeper than did ever plummet soundI'll drown my book.

William Shakespeare

In old age, past haunts the present; memories replace the real life!

Mehmet Murat ildan

La felicità non consiste nel mettersi al riparo dalla sofferenza, ma di integrarla al tessuto della nostra esistenza.

Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.

Sophocles

The world will be brighter and wiser without religions, but it will surely be darker and more hopeless without God!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Must I at length the Sword of Justice draw?Oh curst Effects of necessary Law!How ill my Fear they by my Mercy scan,Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.

John Dryden

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

Emma Donoghue

A confused labyrinth of smoky starsentangles my hopes,which are nearly faded

Federico García Lorca

mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.

Joseph Heller

Move on. Be well. Go for it!

Sally Stubbs

Hark, villains! I will grind your bones to dust. (Act V, Scene 2, 2503)

William Shakespeare

in that cold autistic dark.

Cormac McCarthy

True love is eternal infinite and always like itself. It is equal and pure without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

Honoré de Balzac

I'll find a day to massacre them allAnd raze their faction and their family,The cruel father and his traitorous sons,To whom I sued for my dear son's life,And make them know what 'tis to let a queenKneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.

William Shakespeare

The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.

Marcel Pagnol

You have to cross many bridges and you have to walk many paths in your life! But what is more important than this is to know which bridges you should not cross and which paths you must not walk!

Mehmet Murat ildan

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

If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.

Oscar Wilde

Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not.

Oscar Wilde

Courage is very important. Like a muscle it is strengthened by use.

Ruth Gordon

Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.

Maxim Gorky

Courage is the ladder on which all other virtues mount.

Clare Boothe Luce

I am afraid, Torvald, I do not exactly know what religion is. ... When I am away from all this, and am alone, I will look into that matter too. I will see if what the clergyman said is true, or at all events if it is true for me.

Henrik Ibsen

Man appoints and God disappoints.

Cervantes

Remember that existence comes before the happiness and thus to exist is more important than to be happy!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.

Joseph Addison

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