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Quotes by Dramatist
"We can all be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin. . .if the question is, how do you make a poem by Pushkin?- or, what exactly makes one poem or painting or piece of music greater than another?- or, what is beauty?, or liberty?, or virtue?- if the question is, how should we live?. . . then, reason gives no answer or different answers. So something went wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist . . ."
21
"It's beauty that captures your attention, personality that captures your heart.."
21
"I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it."
21
"Only the actions of the just, Smell sweet and blossom in their dust."
21
"A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent."
20
"Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing-a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces."
20
"The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry."
20
"Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit."
20
"Even in Siberia there is happiness."
20
"It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way."
20
"There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People."
20
"To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead."
20
"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."
20
"There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains."
20
"Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful."
20
"I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education."
20
"I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful."
20
"Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems."'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe."
20
"I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them."
20
"Irony is wasted on the stupid."
20
"If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes."
20
"To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes."
20
"The costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life."
20
"There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people."
19
"She lives the poetry she cannot write."
19
"These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs."
19
"It is quite rare for God to provide a great man at the necessary moment to carry out some great deep, which is why when this unusual combination of circumstance does occur, history at once records the name of the chosen one and recommends him to the admiration of posterity."
19
"Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation."
Time,
19
"The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation."
19
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