Quotes
Quotes about Wit
Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.
It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.
Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
Alec Issigonis (we refuse to use the plutocratic terms 'sir' or 'doctor') said a camel is a horse designed by committee. If it was God's committee for an animal adapted to communities without water.. it was a divine consensus.
Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.
I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others; because in it I recognize the union and culmination of my own. To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry; He formed it, and that was Sculpture; He colored it, and that was Painting; He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama.
Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks; Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks. The founder's you: the table is the place: The carvers we: the prologue is the grace. Each act, a course, each scene, a different dish, Though we're in Lent, I doubt you're still for flesh. Satire's the sauce, high-season'd, sharp and rough. Kind masks and beaux, I hope you're pepperproof? Wit is the wine; but 'tis so scarce the true Poets, like vintners, balderdash and brew. Your surly scenes, where rant and bloodshed join. Are butcher's meat, a battle's sirloin: Your scenes of love, so flowing, soft and chaste, Are water-gruel without salt or taste.
And Tragedy should blush as much to stoop To the low mimic follies of a farce, As a grave matron would to dance with girls.
There still remains to mortify a wit The many-headed monster of the pit.
Your scene precariously subsists too long, On French translation and Italian song. Dare to have sense yourselves; assert the stage; Be justly warm'd with your own native rage.
Working in the theatre has a lot in common with unemployment.
A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.
That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it; This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundreds soon hit: His high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit.
The best way to keep good acts in memory is to refresh them with new.
What one has, one ought to use; and whatever he does he should do with all his might. [Lat., Quod est, eo decet uti: et quicquid agas, agere pro viribus.]
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
Whatever you do, do with all your might.
If you live in the river you should make friends with the crocodile.
A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.
Season your admiration for a while With an attent ear. . . .
The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. . . . The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration . . . because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.
Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it be still fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.
What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others.
