Great Throughts Treasury

"The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die."

"Shake yourself free from the manikin you create out of a false interpretation of what you do and what you feel, and you'll at once see that the manikin you make yourself is nothing at all like what you really are or what you really can be!"

"THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do."

"The secret of living is to find ... the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand."

"This is the real drama for me; the belief that we all, you see, think of ourselves as one single person: but it's not true: each of us is several different people, and all these people live inside us. With one person we seem like this and with another we seem very different. But we always have the illusion of being the same person for everybody and of always being the same person in everything we do. But it's not true! It's not true! We find this out for ourselves very clearly when by some terrible chance we're suddenly stopped in the middle of doing something and we're left dangling there, suspended. We realize then, that every part of us was not involved in what we'd been doing and that it would be a dreadful injustice of other people to judge us only by this one action as we dangle there, hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity, as if the whole of one's personality were summed up in that single, interrupted action."

"The tragedies in the sense that I am, and that each of us sees and is believed to be the only one, but this is not true. That each and every one of us has multiple personalities number of possibilities that lie in us: For some have both of us Chksawahadda, and for others, be someone completely different, we are always illusions that we are one person for everyone, and this person always does not change, we believe that this person remains as it is when you do anything, but this is absolutely not true"

"The souls have their own particular way of understand each other, to enter into intimacy, giving ourselves up to you, while our people are, however clumsy in the business of common words, in the bondage of social needs. Han proprii their needs and aspirations of their own souls, to which the body does not give understood when see the impossibility of satisfying them and translate them into action. And whenever two who communicate with each other well, with only the souls, you will find yourself somewhere, try a disturbance painful and almost a violent aversion of every slightest touch material, a suffering that separates them, and which ceases immediately, not barely a third party intervenes. Then, past the anguish, the two souls raised you searched for and come back to smile from afar."

"Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist."

"We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself, too."

"We all grasp on to a single idea of ourselves, the way aging people dye their hair. It?s no matter that this dye doesn?t fool you. My lady, you don?t dye your hair to deceive other people, or to fool yourself, but rather to cheat your image in your mirror a little."

"We get paid to hang out in this beautiful court! Four puppets on a string, just like Those two up there (pointing to the two puppets hanging), waiting for someone to jerk them into life and make them talk."

"Well, Mr. Meis, the fate of Rome is the identical. The popes had made ??- in their own way, of course - a font, we Italians have we done in our own way, an ashtray."

"We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk."

"What is the stage? It's a place, baby, you know, where people play at being serious, a place where they act comedies. We've got to act a comedy now, dead serious."

"When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him."

"When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him."

"Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be - like the reality of yesterday - an illusion tomorrow."

"When a character is created, immediately distanced himself from the author takes to be independent. Others can see him in other situations in which the author has not thought of. And the meaning that which is another writer who has never been nuts."

"Why are you so anxious to destroy in the name of a vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality comes to birth Which Attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself, Which has indeed blackberries right to live here than you, since it is much truer than you - if you do not mind my saying so?"

"When you say you are in love with humanity, you are well satisfied with yourself."

"Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!"

"Woman -- for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: "Blind yourself, for I am blind.""

"Woe to him who doesn't know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!"

"Women are like dreams - they are never the way you would like to have them."

"You do not know, poor drunken philosopher, these things do not go even to the mind. But the real cause of all our evils, our sadness of this, you know what? Democracy, my dear, democracy, ie majority rule. Because when the power is in the hands of one man, this One knows that it is one and many have to be content, but when the many govern, contentar think only of themselves, and then you have the most stupid and most odious tyranny : the tyranny disguised as freedom."

"You don?t appreciate the fact that madmen are very lucky."

"You should show some respect for what other people see and feel, even though it be the exact opposite of what you see and feel."