Eugene O'Neill Quotes

Those who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers.

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?

- Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It's the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it's Pan. You see him and you die - that is, inside you - and have to go on living as a ghost.
- You have a poet in you but it's a damned morbid one!

You're worse than decent. You're virtuous.

Any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy.

Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.

HOGAN-No, I wouldn't think it, but my motto in life is never trust anyone too far, not even myself.

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 ...

One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate - and remain forever scatheless.

I discovered early in life that living frightened me when I was sober.

You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.

No matter how deep my sleep I shall hear you, and not all the power of death can keep my spirit from wagging a grateful tail. I will always love you as only a dog can.

Oh, I'm so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! You won't help me! You won't put yourself out the least bit! You don't know how to act in a home! You don't really want one! You never wanted one - never since the day we were married! You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second-rate hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms!

It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness.

I hate doctors! They'll do anything ... to keep you coming to them. They'll sell their souls. What's worse, they'll sell yours, and you never know it till one day you find yourself in hell.

The trouble with you, I think, is you are still too dependent on others. You expect too much from outside you and demand too little of yourself. You hope everything will be made smooth and easy for you by someone else. Well, it's coming to the point where you are old enough, and have been around enough, to see that this will get you exactly nowhere. You will be what you make yourself and you have got to do that job absolutely alone and on your own, whether you're in school or holding down a job.

If that ghost have money I tells him never to haunt you
less'n he wants to lose it!

God gave us mouths that close and ears that don't ... that should tell us something.

That's right! Run him down! Run down everybody! Everyone is a fake to you!

But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.

I know it's useless to talk. But sometimes I feel so lonely.

The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!

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.

When I was a kid I used to get fun out of my horrors.

I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!.. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. 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, you 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 towards nowhere for no good reason.

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.

One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.

Happiness hates the timid! So does science!

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.

I spent a year in Professor Baker's famous class at Harvard. There, too, I learned some things that were useful to me-particularly what not to do. Not to take ten lines, for instance, to say something that can be said in one line.

Irish as a Paddy's pig.

Age's terms of peace, after the long interlude of war with life, have still to be concluded-Youth must keep 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.

What's the use coming home to get the blues over what can't be helped.

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us.

You'll say to yourself, I'm just an old man who is scared of life, but even more scared of dying. So I'm keeping drunk and hanging on to life at any price, and what of it?

I am so far from being a pessimist ... on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life.

The devil! what beastly things our memories insist on cherishing!

(General Wetjoen talking about the Boer War)Let him come! I have seen them come before
at Margesfontein, Spion Kiopje, Modder River. Stepping into battle, left right left right, waving their silly swords, so afraid they couldn't show off how brave they was, and with mine rifle I kills them so easy!

What beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing, the ugly, and the disgusting; the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember.

Life is a long drawn out lie, with a sniffling sigh at the end of it.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

LAVINIA: He made me feel for the first time in my life that everything about love could be sweet and natural ... I have a right to love!

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 that we are living.

No dog is as well bred or as well mannered or as distinguished and handsome.

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.

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.

We are such things as rubbish is made of, so let's drink up and forget it.

The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.

And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'it is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."" (He grins at his father provocatively.)

LAVINIA: I love everything that grows simply
up toward the sun
everything that's straight and strong! I hate what's warped and twists and eats into itself and dies for a lifetime in shadow ...

Well, you wanted me to be a hero in blue, so you better be resigned! Murdering doesn't improve one's manners!

Two days ago we waded through the mud out to this grave beneath the pines at the foot of the hill to place a Christmas wreath on it, hoping he would look down from the Paradise of Ten Billion Trees and Unrationable Dog Biscuits and pity us.

Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got - nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won't admit it.

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. 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. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

I will be an artist or nothing!

Critics? I love every bone in their heads.

The sea hates a coward.

Where am I? What the hell difference is it? There's plenty o' fresh air and the moon fur a glim. Don't be so damn pertic'lar!

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

Dey's some things I don't got to be told. I kin read them in folks' eyes.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

Because any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy. But beyond that it is entirely up to you. You've got to do for yourself all the seeking and finding concerned with what you want to do. Anyone but yourself is useless to you there.

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 always be a little in love with death.

it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

On my solemn oath, Edmund, I'd gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.

Dogs ... do not ruin their sleep worrying about how to keep the objects they have, and to obtain the objects they have not. There is nothing of value they have to bequeath except their love and their faith.

When men make gods, there is no God!

It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. [ ... ] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.

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!

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.

How thick the fog is. I can't see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It's getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness.