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Quotes by Dramatist
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it."
21
"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."
21
"Pleasure and action make the hours seem short."
21
"But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds."
21
"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
21
"People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."
21
"The world loves the Saint, and Christ loves the sinner."
21
"I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly."
21
"The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty."
21
"How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive."
21
"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."
21
"To most of us the real life is the life we do not lead."
21
"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
21
"An excellent man he has no enemies and none of his friends like him."
21
"The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream."
21
"Things are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is according to the mode in which one looks at it."
21
"False face must hide what the false heart doth know."
20
"We triumph without glory when we conquer without danger."
20
"You are my son Dantès! You are the child of my captivity. My priestly office condemned me to celibacy: God sent you to me both to console the man who could not be a father and the prisoner who could not be free."
20
"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."
20
"When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?"
20
"By my soul I swear, there is no power in the tongue of man to alter me."
20
"Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself."
20
"I began a poem in lines of one syllable. It's rather difficult, but the merit of all things lies in their difficulty. The subject matter is gallant. I'll read you the first canto; it's four hundred verses long and takes one minute."
20
"Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it."
20
"Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy."
20
"Conscience is, in most men, an anticipation of the opinions of others."
20
"But somehow, I feel sure that if I lived in the country for six months, I should become so unsophisticated that no one would take the slightest notice of me."
20
"The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and implacable fires of human desperation."
20
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