I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.
Throughout the play everything possible was done to show the virtue, innocence and helplessness of the poor, and the abandoned cruelty, the heartless self-indulgence of the rich.
Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul – politics does the same thing for the body.
No doubt any connoisseur, any collector, some bored old millionaire when he shows off his treasures, is seeking in your praise the resurrection and the life.
A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice.
Old men when they begin to hear the last trumpet, on the morning breeze, often have a kind of absent-minded smile; like people listening. And their smiles are just politeness.
The principal fact of life is the free mind.
I had come at last and my heart was beating again strongly to a heart that could not know despair because it forgot itself in the duty of its love.
People don’t use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts.
Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother?
A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.
A friend of mine tells me that a Beethoven symphony can solve for him a problem of conduct. I’ve no doubt that it does so simply by giving him a sense of the tragedy and the greatness of human destiny, which makes his personal anxieties seem small, which throws them into a new proportion.
Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends. Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.
For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.
What is it in the actor, the stage, that casts so powerful a spell on the young imagination?
The will is never free – it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car – it can’t steer.
I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.
I had from childhood not only the experience of love and truth common to all family life, but the idea of them embodied in the person of Jesus, a picture always present to our imagination as well as our feelings.
Sara could commit adultery at one end and weep for her sins at the other, and enjoy both operations at once.
God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.
So evil is the brood of the slogans that the most splendid and noble battle cries, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, bred nothing but new and more cunning, more hypocritical despots, better organised murder, popular nationalism drunk with the conceit of hooligans, militarism as the tool of demagogues, hatred not to be assuaged by the blood of millions and a century of tears.