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Quotes by Dramatist
"I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die."
17
"All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction."
17
"Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life."
17
"The kingdoms of kings are confined, either by mountains or rivers, or by a change in customs or by a difference of language; but my kingdom is as great as the world, because I am neither Italian, nor French, nor Hindu, nor American, nor a Spaniard; I am a cosmopolitan. No country can claim to be my birthplace, God alone knows in which region I shall die. I adopt every custom, I speak every tongue [... ] In this way, you see, being of no country, asking for the protection of no goverment and acknowledging no man as my brother, I am not restrained or hampered by a single one of the scruples that tie the hands of the powerful or the obstacles that block the path of the weak."
17
"What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults."
17
"I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."
17
"Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that."
17
"Desire increases when fulfillment is postponed."
17
"It is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so."
17
"Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible."
17
"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
17
"My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect-simply a confession of failures."
17
"High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace."
17
"Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig."
17
"God is merciful to all, as he has been to you; he is first a father, then a judge."
17
"I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked."
17
"My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice."
17
"God and other artists are always a little obscure....."
17
"Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it."
17
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life."
17
"Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter! My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him. All cheer for Shakespearean insults."
17
"All I want to do now is look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to."
17
"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."
17
"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
17
"To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for."
17
"But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to."
17
"What's done, is done."
17
"It is necessary ... to yield to the storm, purchase a peace, and wait patiently for better times."
17
"Ignorance of mortality is a comfort."
17
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