Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is a base thing for a man among the people not to obey those in command. Never in a state can the laws be well administered when fear does not stand firm.
The tyrant is a child of Pride Who drinks from his sickening cup Recklessness and vanity, Until from his high crest headlong He plummets to the dust of hope.
Who feels no ills, should, therefore, fear them; and when fortune smiles, be doubly cautious, lest destruction come remorseless on him, and he fall unpitied.
Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.
Dayodhuam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you - gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.
I actually think we should be trying to be rigorous in our thinking about television and the way it enters our lives and shapes the way so many people think.
Death when to death a death by death hath given Then shall be op't the long shut gates of heaven. [Mors, mortis morti mortem nisi morte dedisset (dedisses).]
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.
You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.
A stage play ought to be the point of intersection between the visible and invisible worlds, or, in other words, the display, the manifestation of the hidden.
They say Princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.
It's inevitable that you will die, so the only question is when. The great thrillers are the moments that play and tease with the question, "When will it be?"
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.
When I was in high school, I was going to be a painter because I had a facility for painting. I could do it, but I didn't have anything to say in that medium.
I was a waitress for nine years, which I don't regret at all. It taught me about discipline. I was always writing; it took a long time to make a career of it.
The sex illusion is not a fixed quantity: not what mathematicians call a constant. It varies from zero in my wife's case to madness in that of our stepsister.
An Englishman does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.
The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.
Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch?
If you look at the primitive societies that we know about, the worst thing that could have happened to you was to be captured and be turned over to the women.
My first true lesson in writing came from Mr. Bowden when I was 16. At my high school, he was the teacher known to be the very best at literature and writing.
I mean New York City is the financial capital of the world. It's where all the money passes through, the Dow Jones, whatever, that's where all the money goes.
And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.
I took the standpoint that the profession of technologist, a man who masters matter, is a masculine profession, if not the only masculine profession there is.
Without vanity a writer's work is tepid, and he must accept his vanity as part of his stock in trade and live with it as one of the hazards of his profession.
When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come.
What I really value about being a writer is that I can go to rehearsal when I want to, and then, when I need to be at home writing or with my kids, I go home.
There is an ancient saying among men that you cannot thoroughly understand the life of mortals before the man has died, then only can you call it good or bad.
My father used to say: "Never suspect people, It's better to be deceived or mistaken, which is only human, after all, than to be suspicious, which is common."
Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
Love's but the frailty of the mind, When 'tis not with ambition joined; A sickly flame, which if not fed expires; And feeding, wastes in self-consuming fires.
Action is the normal completion of the act of will which begins as prayer. That action is not always external, but it is always some kind of effective energy.
I find it fascinating to see other people's photos on social media but I don't upload pictures myself. I don't even know how to. I'm completely digital-phobic.
I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.
A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life.
[David] Mamet's the writer I admire most but he's way off from when he tries to talk about what the moral appeal of liberal thought is. His heart is not in it.
New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.
The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.
If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
My father was one of the first six guys ashore on Iwo Jima. He's 86 years old now, and every single night of his life, he has nightmares, and he wakes yelling.
Hybridity keeps me from being rigid about most things. It has taught me to appreciate the contradictions in the world and in my life. I scavenge from the best.