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Quotes by Dramatist
"We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth."
14
"Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to."
14
"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures."
14
"My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity."
14
"Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;This sensible warm motion to becomeA kneaded clod; and the delighted spiritTo bathe in fiery floods, or to resideIn thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,And blown with restless violence round aboutThe pendent world; or to be worse than worstOf those that lawless and incertain thoughtImagine howling: 'tis too horrible!The weariest and most loathed worldly lifeThat age, ache, penury and imprisonmentCan lay on nature is a paradiseTo what we fear of death."
14
"Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends."
14
"I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad and to travel for it too!"
14
"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
14
"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril."
14
"POLONIUS My lord, the queen would speak with you, and presently.HAMLET Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?POLONIUS By th'mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed.HAMLET Methinks it is like a weasel.POLONIUS It is backed like a weasel.HAMLET Or like a whale?POLONIUS Very like a whale.HAMLET Then I will come to my mother by and by. - They fool me to the top of my bent. - I will come by and by."
14
"Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all."
14
"The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic."
14
"A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing."
14
"Then, were not summer's distillation leftA liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet."
14
"You use a glass mirror to see your face, you use works of art to see your soul."
14
"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience."
14
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."
14
"Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love. We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report: this cannot be cunning in her; if it be, she makes a shower of rain as well as Jove."
14
"His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion."
14
"Your face, my thane, is as a book where menMay read strange matters. To beguile the time,Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,But be the serpent under't."
14
"You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."
14
"The Brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing, and think it were not night."
14
"The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people."
14
"She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain."
14
"I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion."
14
"There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch of the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not."
14
"To wait at Monte Cristo for the purpose of watching like a dragon over the almost incalculable richs that had thus fallen into his possession satisfied not the cravings of his heart, which yearned to return to dwell among mankind, and to assume the rank, power, and influence which are always accorded to wealth - that first and greatest of all the forces within the grasp of man."
14
"Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lieIf this night before God's throne should stand."
14
"It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret."
14
"People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them."
14
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