19th-century Playwright Quotes

Everyone tends to remember the past with greater fervor as the present gains greater importance.

In comedy there are only two main parts. He who slaps and he who gets slapped. It is never the one who slaps who gets the laughs.

Georges Feydeau

If you wish to grow thinner, diminish your dinner,
And take to light claret instead of pale ale;
Look down with an utter contempt upon butter,
And never touch bread till its toasted--or stale.

Henry Sambrooke Leigh

The circle is the fundamental geometry of open human communication.

The duty of a scientist is not to distort the manifestations of natural phenomena in the light of some more or less popular idea. His duty is to explain facts.

Émile Cammaerts

The ignorant frighten children with ghosts, and the better educated assure them there is no such thing. Our understanding may believe the latter, but our instincts believe the former; so that, out of this education, we retain the terror, and just believe enough to make it very troublesome whenever we are placed in circumstances that awaken it.

Catherine Crowe

"Which is more useful, the Sun or the Moon?" asks Kuzma Prutkov, the renowned Russian philosopher, and after some reflection he answers himself: "The Moon is the more useful, since it gives us its light during the night, when it is dark, whereas the Sun shines only in the daytime, when it is light anyway."

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Medicine is a rich soil but it doesn't yield its harvest unaided.

Men are always murderers, and their calmness and generosity is the calmness of a well-fed animal, that knows itself out of danger.

Leonid Andreyev

Adventure must be held in delicate fingers. It should be handled, not embraced. It should be sipped, not swallowed at a gulp.

Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.

As a breath on glass, - As witch-fires that burn, The gods and monsters pass, Are dust, and return.

George Sterling

The cold blast at the casement beats;
The window-panes are white;
The snow whirls through the empty streets;
It is a dreary night!

Thorkell Mylrea had waited long for a dead man's shoes, but he was wearing them at length.

Not every age allows its sons to reap the results which remain great for all time, and... not every century is fitted to make the men who live in it distinguished and happy.

I tell you of all history the most beautiful product is the family tie.

It is only the strong who are strengthened by suffering; the weak are made weaker.

Lion Feuchtwanger

An optimist … is a person who thinks the future is uncertain.

To say in print what she thinks is the last thing the woman novelist or journalist is so rash as to attempt…Her publishers are not women.

Elizabeth Robins

Sleep does make us all equal, it seems to me, like his big brother-Death.

Arthur Schnitzler

Many men are like unto sausages: whatever you stuff them with, that they will bear in them.

Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy

When I hear the word "culture"... I reach for my pistol.

Modern American marriage is like a wire fence. The woman's the wire -the posts are the husband's.

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell

My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through‚ to be two months without going into a house‚ under the snow in trenches. And no food to get‚ maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there‚ he said‚ to feed all Ireland; but bad management‚ they could not get it.

Augusta, Lady Gregory

It is by muteness that a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value; with him one is at peace, where words play no torturing tricks.Those are the moments that I think are precious to a dog-when, with his adoring soul coming through his eyes, he feels that you are really thinking of him.

John Galsworthy