Eugene O'Neill Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

Eugene O'Neill
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!

Eugene O'Neill
Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.

Eugene O'Neill
Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.

Eugene O'Neill
Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time

Eugene O'Neill
Life is perhaps most wisely regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings, and every day is a life in miniature.

Eugene O'Neill
We are where centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand lives, our eyes begin to open.

Eugene O'Neill
We'd be making sail in the dawn, with a fair breeze, singing a chanty song wid no care to it. And astern the land would be sinking low and dying out, but we'd give it no heed but a laugh, and never look behind. For the day that was, was enough, for we was free men — and I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come — until they're old like me.

Eugene O'Neill
The only living life is in the past and future—the present is an interlude—strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness we are living.

Eugene O'Neill
One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.

Eugene O'Neill
A man's work is in danger of deteriorating when he thinks he has found the one best formula for doing it. If he thinks that, he is likely to feel that all he needs is merely to go on repeating himself... so long as a person is searching for better ways of doing his work, he is fairly safe.

Eugene O'Neill
Born in a goddam hotel room and dying in a hotel room!

Eugene O'Neill
DARRELL: Happiness hates the timid! So does Science!

Eugene O'Neill
It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more. Its the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back.

Eugene O'Neill
Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?

Eugene O'Neill
It's queer they'd be allowin' the sick ones to read books when I'll bet it's the same lazy readin' in the house bought the half of them down with the consumption itself.

Eugene O'Neill
I hate doctors! They'll do anything—anything to keep you coming to them. They'll sell their souls! What's worse, they'll sell yours, and you'll never know it until one day you find yourself in hell.

Eugene O'Neill
For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makes you emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks. If dey's one thing I learns in ten years on de Pullman cars listenin' to de white quality talk, it's dat same fact.

Eugene O'Neill
Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.

Eugene O'Neill
One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate — and remain forever scatheless.

Eugene O'Neill
Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

Eugene O'Neill
A game of secret, cunning stratagems, in which only the fools who are fated to lose reveal their true aims or motives - even to themselves.

Eugene O'Neill
You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.

Eugene O'Neill
We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that Dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.

Eugene O'Neill
Or rather, I inherited the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it. I am sired by gold and damned by it, as they say at the race track — damned in more ways than one.

Eugene O'Neill