19th-century Playwright Quotes

When a man has been the lover of a woman as that man had been hers, with the vibrating communion of a voluptuousness unbroken for two years, that woman maintains a sort of physiological, quasi-animal instinct. A gesture, the accent of a word, a sigh, a blush, a pallor, are signs for her that her intuition interprets with infallible certainty. How and why is that instinct accompanied by absolute oblivion of former caresses? It is a particular case of that insoluble and melancholy problem of the birth and death of love.

And for that they were rich,/And robbed the poor; and for that they were strong,/And scourged the weak; and for that they made laws/Which turned the sweat of labor's brow to blood! - /For these their sins the nations cast them out.

Sacrifice may be a flower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this flower that virtue set forth on its travels.

Maurice Maeterlinck

You have to beat out for yourself many mornings on the windy headlands the sense of the fact that you get the same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of your garden hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to it.

Mary Hunter Austin

Loving-kindness is the better part of goodness. It lends grace to the sterner qualities of which this consists.

W. Somerset Maugham

Any human love a man gets he can make fill his life. It's like the grain of mustard-seed.

William John Locke

Imagine, if you can, what the rest of the evening was like. How they crouched by the fire which blazed and leaped and made much of itself in the little grate. How they removed the covers of the dishes, and found rich, hot savory soup, which was a meal in itself, and sandwiches and toast and muffins enough for both of them.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman's face, or worse--
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil.

William Butler Yeats

A kiss! When all is said, what is a kiss? An oath of allegiance taken in closer proximity, a promise more precise, a seal on a confession, a rose-red dot upon the letter i in loving; a secret which elects the mouth for ear; an instant of eternity murmuring like a bee; balmy communion with a flavor of flowers; a fashion of inhaling each other's hearts, and of tasting, on the brink of the lips, each other's soul!

I've almost come to feel that it doesn't make much difference what you believe in — the thing that's important is a state of belief. It's much better to believe in nonsense than in nothing.

Margaret Ayer Barnes

The more debris there is the more it will show the governor's activity.

Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

In the world of dreams, I have chosen my part. To sleep for a season and hear no word Of true love's truth or of light love's art, Only the song of a secret bird.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.

Honoré de Balzac

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.

I have often been told, on the occasion of the publication of some important scientific work, that 'whatever there is true in it is not new, and what is new is not true.' This means in plain language: 'we understand what we know, but that which we ought to know, we do not understand.'

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Government defines the physical aspects of man by means of The Printed Form, so that for every man in the flesh there is an exactly corresponding man on paper.

A pretty woman's worth some pains to see,
Nor is she spoiled, I take it, if a crown
Completes the forehead pale and tresses pure.

Robert Browning

There's nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.

Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all—as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens.

Lovers are Like walking ghosts, they always haunt the spot Of their misdeeds.

George Henry Boker

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

Guy de Maupassant

[About the diaspora] Canaan is too small for God's children. The Land of Israel will spread through all lands!

Isaac Leib Peretz

Hanging head downwards between cliffs of bone, was the baby, its arms all but clasped about its neck, its face aslant upon its arms, hair painted upon its skull, closed, secret eyes, a diver poised in albumen, ancient and epic, shot with delicate spasms, as old as a Pharaoh in its tomb.