19th-century Playwright Quotes

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

Be good, be young, be true! Evil is nothing but vanity, let us have the pride of good, and above all let us never despair.

Alexandre Dumas, fils

Will you tell me how a man's
to live, and face his life, if he can't believe
that truth's like a fire,
and will burn through and be seen
though it takes all the years there are?

Maxwell Anderson

Two times two — is two!, Yes! I shall prove it by means of analogy, the highest form of proof. Follow carefully. One times one is one, therefore two times two is two. What applies to one applies to the other.

August Strindberg

Anybody who can write home for money can write for the magazines.

Glory glory alleluia
I'm the luckiest of females
For I've danced with a man
Who's danced with a girl
Who's danced with the Prince of Wales.

Herbert Farjeon

Once you smear it, or you scratch it,
It's impossible to match it.

Arthur Wing Pinero

What do you mean, funny? Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?

Preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns.

William Dean Howells

Opportunity knocks once at every man's door and then keeps on knocking.

Doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.

Natalie Clifford Barney

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

Alfred de Vigny

Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies; parching peelers, and the juries fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law.

John Millington Synge

Happy is he who can forget what cannot be changed.

Somehow love gives even to a dull man the knowledge of his lover's heart.

The wide wonder of Broadway is disconsolate in the daytime; but gaudily glorious at night, with a milling crowd filling sidewalk and roadway, silent, going up, going down, between upstanding banks of brilliant lights, each building braided and embossed with glowing, many-coloured bulbs of man-rayed luminance. A glowing valley of the shadow of life. The strolling crowd went slowly by through the kinematically divine thoroughfare of New York.