Dramatist Quotes

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat.

The repose of darkness is deeper on the water than on the land.

Hypocrisy is nothing, in fact, but a horrible hopefulness.

Philosophy is the microscope of thought.

The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand.

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far from being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant than ever.

You know my faithfulness to you, never can another own my heart, never - never - never...

To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.

Every step which the intelligence of Europe has taken has been in spite of the clerical party.

Everybody has noticed the way cats stop and loiter in a half-open door. Hasn't everyone said to a cat: For heavens sake why don't you come in? With opportunity half-open in front of them, there are men who have a similar tendency to remain undecided between two solutions, at the risk of being crushed by fate abruptly closing the opportunity. The overprudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes run more danger than the bold

It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer.

We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination.

All who suffer are full of hatred; all who live drag a remorse: the dead alone have broken their chains.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

Give to a being the useless, and deprive him of the needful, and you have the gamin.

...Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyzes and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world surrounding us returns what it receives; it is likely that contemplators are contemplated.

[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity.

Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.

There is no distress so complete but that even in the most critical moments the inexplicable sunrise of hope is seen in its depths.

While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.

I was in a state of gnawing, sensuous agitation that excited continually both blood and nerves when I sketched out the music for 'Tannhauser' and brought it to completion.

I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.

Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.

The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness.

The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness.

Imagination creates reality.

But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

Equality does not mean that all plants must grow to the same height - a society of tall grass and dwarf trees, a jostle of conflicting jealousies. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight; and in religious terms that all beliefs will enjoy equal rights.

It is impossible to communicate with Schumann. The man is hopeless; he doesn't talk at all.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.

Perseverance, secret of all triumphs.

Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

Nothing is so stifling as symmetry. Symmetry is boredom, the quintessence of mourning. Despair yawns. There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering - a hell of boredom.

Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.

Everything Changes. The only thing that remains immovable across the centuries and fixes the character of a people is cooking.

No one knows like a woman how to say things which are at once gentle and deep.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

He saw before him two roads, both equally straight ; but he saw two; and that terrified him — him, who had never in his life known but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.

Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.

If I have not been exposed and am not in any danger of pursuit. But I have been exposed, I am pursued - by myself! That is a pursuer that does not readily let go.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.

This conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society. To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise.

Love, thine is the future. Death, I use thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, there shall be in the future neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance nor blood for blood.

To rise at six, to dine at ten,To sup at six, to sleep at ten,Makes a man live for ten times ten.

Many great actions are committed in small struggles.

I was always a lover of soft-winged things.

Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.

I exist," murmurs someone whose name is Everyone. "I'm young and in love; I am old and I want rest; I work, I prosper, I do good business, I have houses to rent, money in State Securities; I am happy, I have wife and children; I like all these things and I want to go on living, so leave me alone."... There are moments when all this casts a deep chill on the large-minded pioneers of the human race.

True thinkers are characterized by a blending of clearness and mystery.

You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater mystery, woman.

Algebra applies to the clouds.

A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

Those who do not weep, do not see.