Eugene ONeill Quotes

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

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.

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

We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.

We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves.

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.

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.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

Writing is my vacation from living.

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.

We are where centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand lives, our eyes begin to open.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

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.

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?

One last word of farewell, dear master and mistress. Whenever you visit my grave, say to yourselves with regret but also happiness in your hearts at the remembrance of my long happy life with you: "Here lies one who loves us and whom we loved." 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.

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

Suppose I was to tell you that it's just beauty that's calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell which lures me, the need of freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on----in quest of the secret which is hidden over there----beyond the horizon?

Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.

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

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.

Happiness hates the timid. So does science.

The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

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, 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 toward nowhere, for no good reason!

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