Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.
All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.
We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.
Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.
Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?
The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.
What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.
How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.