George Jean Nathan Quotes

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

The bachelors admired freedom is often a yoke, for the freer a man is to himself the greater slave he often is to the whims of others.

A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.

All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.

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

My code of life and conduct is simply this: work hard, play to the allowable limit, disregard equally the good and bad opinion of others, never do a friend a dirty trick, eat and drink what you feel like when you feel like, never grow indignant over anything, trust to tobacco for calm and serenity, bathe twice a day ... learn to play at least one musical instrument and then play it only in private, never allow one's self even a passing thought of death, never contradict anyone or seek to prove anything to anyone unless one gets paid for it in cold, hard coin, live the moment to the utmost of its possibilities, treat one's enemies with polite inconsideration, avoid persons who are chronically in need, and be satisfied with life always but never with one's self.

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

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.

It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

Art is the sex of the imagination.

Musicals are to the theater what wines are to a substantial dinner.

So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.

I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.

The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.

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

The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.

Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open.

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.

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

I drink to make other people interesting.

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

Hollywood is ten million dollars worth of intricate and high ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.

Shaw writes plays for the ages, the ages between five and twelve.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

The dramatic critic who is without prejudice is on the plane with the general who does not believe in taking human life.

Sex touches the heavens only when it simultaneously touches the gutter and the mud.

Drama - what literature does at night.

Love demands infinitely less than friendship.

The triumph of sugar over diabetes.

The Russian dramatist is one who, walking through a cemetery, does not see the flowers on the graves. The American dramatist ... Does not see the graves under the flowers.

No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.

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.

What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency.

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

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.

A ham is simply any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts.

I drink so the others become interesting.

It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.

It is the mark of a superior person that, left to themselves they are able endlessly to amuse, interest and entertain themselves out of their personal stock of meditations, ideas, criticisms, memories, philosophy, humor and what not.

There is no legimate actor who can resist the powerful lure of the movies. It isn't the money that fetches him. It isn't the great publicity. It is simply this: the movies enable an actor to look at himself.

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.