Great Throughts Treasury

"Serenity is complete self-abnegation and enormous understanding."

"The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life."

"The weaker partner in a marriage is the one who loves the most."

"To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner."

"When we grow old, there can only be one regret - not to have given enough of ourselves."

"Work means so many things! So many! Among other things, work also means freedom... Without it even the miracle of love is only a cruel deception."

"I feel that I have never known nor shall I ever know how to act! Those poor women in my plays have entered so totally into my heart and head, that while I am striving as best I can to make the audience understand them, I almost feel like comforting them … but it is they who, little by little, end up by comforting me! How – and why, and at what point – this affectionate, inexplicable, and undeniable “exchange” takes place between those women and me … it would take too long and be too difficult to relate precisely. The fact remains that, while everybody else is suspicious of the women, I get along beautifully with them! I pay no attention if they have lied, if they have betrayed, if they have sinned, if they were born crooked, as long as I feel that they have wept, that they have suffered as a result of lying or betraying or loving."

"I have the greatest of all riches: that of not desiring them."

"I did not use paint, I made myself up morally."

"If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive."