Eugene O'Neill Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.

Eugene O'Neill
What beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing!…the ugly and disgusting…the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember!

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
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
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
The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

Eugene O'Neill
But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

Eugene O'Neill
You mustn't feel sorry for me. Don't you see I'm happy at last — free — free! — freed from the farm — free to wander on and on — eternally! Look! Isn't it beautiful beyond the hills? I can hear the old voices calling me to come — And this time I'm going! It isn't the end. It's a free beginning — the start of my voyage! I've won to my trip — the right of release — beyond the horizon! Oh, you ought to be glad — glad — for my sake!

Eugene O'Neill
Strange interlude! Yes, our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electrical display of God the Father!

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
How thick the fog is. I can't see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It's getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness.

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
We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.

Eugene O'Neill
I spent a year in Professor Baker's famous class at Harvard. There, too, I learned some things that were useful to me-particularly what not to do. Not to take ten lines, for instance, to say something that can be said in one line.

Eugene O'Neill
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

Eugene O'Neill
If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.

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

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

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

Eugene O'Neill
It is Mystery - the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event - or accident - in any life on earth...

Eugene O'Neill
Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.

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
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
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