Eugene O'Neill - Life Quotes

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

Eugene O'Neill
A credulous, religious-minded fool, as I've pointed out! And he carried his credulity into the next period of his life, where he believed in one social or philosophical Ism after another, always on the trail of Truth! He was never courageous enough to face what he really knew was true, that there is no truth for men, that human life in unimportant and meaningless. No. He was always grasping at some absurd new faith to find an excuse for going on!

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
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
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
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
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