Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good
I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody's thinking about you the whole time.
The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.
The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.
Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.
That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.
Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
When you're at war, you think about a better life; when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.
It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day
There is no creation without faith and hope. There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation.
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.
Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.
There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.
When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.
The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.
EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.
Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?
Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.
Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims; it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps