Eugene O'Neill Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
We's all poor nuts and things happen, and we yust get mixed in wrong, that's all.

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
It has been a long day. Why don't you sleep now—as you used to, remember?—for a little while.

Eugene O'Neill
The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too.

Eugene O'Neill
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

Eugene O'Neill
I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame; I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame; But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves, Where the rainbows play in the flying spray, 'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.

Eugene O'Neill
We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves.

Eugene O'Neill
Age's terms of peace, after the long interlude of war with life, have still to be concluded—Youth must be kept decently away—so many old wounds may have to be unbound, and old scars pointed to with pride, to prove to ourselves we have been brave and noble.

Eugene O'Neill
Yank: Sure! Lock me up! Put me in a cage! Dat's de on'y answer yuh know. G'wan, lock me up! Policeman: What you been doin'? Yank: Enough to gimme life for! I was born, see? Sure, dat's de charge. Write it in de blotter. I was born, get me!

Eugene O'Neill
There is no present or future—only the past happening over and over again—now.

Eugene O'Neill
Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby.

Eugene O'Neill
You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really — except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better.

Eugene O'Neill
Why can't you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You'll find what you're trying to say in him- as you'll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.'' - 'Fine! That's beautiful. But I wasn't trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let's drink up and forget it. That's more my idea.

Eugene O'Neill
What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—Well no matter. It's a late day for regrets.

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

Eugene O'Neill
Is it one wid this you'd be, Yank — black smoke from the funnels smudging the sea, smudging the decks — the bloody engines pounding and throbbing and shaking — wid divil a sight of sun or a breath of clean air — choking our lungs wid coal dust — breaking our backs and hearts in the hell of the stokehole — feeding the bloody furnace — feeding our lives along wid the coal, I'm thinking — caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo!

Eugene O'Neill
The old – like children – talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!

Eugene O'Neill