Quotations by Arthur Miller

ARTHUR MILLER (1915 – 2005), AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT AND ESSAYIST

"I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity."

~ Arthur Miller, Tragedy and the Common Man

"A man is not an orange. You can't eat the fruit and throw the peel away."

~ Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

"The need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star."

~ Arthur Miller, Tragedy and the Common Man

"Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood."

~ Arthur Miller, The Crucible, act II

"A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man."

~ Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

"Theology, sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small."

~ Arthur Miller, The Crucible

"Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day."

~ Arthur Miller, Paris Review, Summer 1966

"One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives."

~ Arthur Miller, The Shadows of the Gods

"I do not believe that any work of art can help but be diminished by its adherence at any cost to a political program ... and not for any other reason than that there is no political program -- any more than there is a theory of tragedy -- which can encompass the complexities of real life."

~ Arthur Miller, Introduction to Collected Plays

"The Jungle is dark but full of diamonds."

~ Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

"I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self."

~ Arthur Miller, After the Fall

"Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood."

~ Arthur Miller, The Crucible

"Society is inside of man and man is inside society, and you cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity on the stage until you understand his social relations and their power to make him what he is and to prevent him from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish."

~ Arthur Miller, The Shadows of the Gods

"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."

~ Arthur Miller, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

"The shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars."

~ Arthur Miller, The Shadows of the Gods

Continue Reading

Quotations by T. S. Eliot

Eliot, T[homas]. S[tearns]. (1888-1965), American-born British dramatist, poet, and critic

"Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel."

~T. S. Eliot

"Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things."

~T. S. Eliot

"Humor is also a way of saying something serious."

~T. S. Eliot

"Humankind cannot stand very much reality."

~T. S. Eliot

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

~T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", II (The Sacred Wood, 1922)

"I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling."

~T. S. Eliot

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

~T. S. Eliot

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

~T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason."

~T. S. Eliot

"Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow"

~T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

"Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow"

~T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

~T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Continue Reading