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Quotes by Dramatist
"The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them."
18
"An excellent man he has no enemies and none of his friends like him."
18
"I write out of my intellectual experience."
18
"The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream."
18
"When change itself can give no more, 'Tis easy to be true."
18
"The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."
18
"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
18
"Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows, which shows like grief itself, but is not so; or sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects: like perspectives which, rightly gaz'd upon, show nothing but confusion."
18
"Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is according to the mode in which one looks at it."
18
"False face must hide what the false heart doth know."
17
"I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure."
17
"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."
17
"Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I'm tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don't understand where I am actually at fault. And add to that my wife's illness, my lack of money, the constant bickering, gossip, unnecessary conversations, that stupid Borkin... My home has become loathsome to me and I find living there worse than torture."
17
"Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting."
17
"The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable."
17
"This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again."
17
"Flies purify the air, and plays--the morals."
17
"I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself."
17
"To conquer without danger is to conquer without glory."
17
"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals."
17
"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."
17
"There are some catastrophes that a poor writer's pen cannot describe and which he is obliged to leave to the imagination of his readers with a bald statement of the facts."
17
"True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know."
17
"The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office."
17
"When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all."
17
"Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals."
17
"The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is."
17
"When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance."
17
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