George Jean Nathan Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

George Jean Nathan
Patriotism, as I see it, is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

George Jean Nathan
A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.

George Jean Nathan
Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.

George Jean Nathan
Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.

George Jean Nathan
A ready way to lose your friend is to lend him money. Another equally ready way to lose him is to refuse to lend him money. It is six of one and a half dozen of the other.

George Jean Nathan
All really great drama is a form of scandal.

George Jean Nathan
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

George Jean Nathan
Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.

George Jean Nathan
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

George Jean Nathan
The most loyal and faithful woman indulges her imagination in a hypothetical liaison whenever she dons a new street frock for the first time.

George Jean Nathan
It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.

George Jean Nathan
A broken heart is a monument to a love that will never die; fulfillment is a monument to a love that is already on its deathbed.

George Jean Nathan
Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.

George Jean Nathan
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.

George Jean Nathan
There is something distinguished about even his failures; they sink not trivially, but with a certain air of majesty, like a great ship, its flags flying, full of holes.

George Jean Nathan
I care not who writes the laws of a country so long as I may listen to its songs.

George Jean Nathan
Art is a reaching out into the ugliness of the world for vagrant beauty and the imprisoning of it in a tangible form.

George Jean Nathan
I know many married men, I even know a few happily married men, but I don't know one who wouldn't fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave him a wink.

George Jean Nathan
An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.

George Jean Nathan
Athletic sports, save in the case of young boys, are designed for idiots.

George Jean Nathan
In the words of a friend of mine, I drink to make other people interesting.

George Jean Nathan
A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of Spring, love, and dogs.

George Jean Nathan
A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.

George Jean Nathan
Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.

George Jean Nathan