Eugene O'Neill Quotes & Sayings

Any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy. — Eugene O'Neill

[Her] love and tenderness ... gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play-write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones. — Eugene O'Neill

It is Mystery - the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event - or accident - in any life on earth ... — Eugene O'Neill

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. — Eugene O'Neill

We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves. — Eugene O'Neill

On my solemn oath, Edmund, I'd gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been. — Eugene O'Neill

What's the use coming home to get the blues over what can't be helped. — Eugene O'Neill

I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame;
I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame;
But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves,
Where the rainbows play in the flying spray,
'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves. — Eugene O'Neill

God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap! — Eugene O'Neill

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. I will always love you as only a dog can. — Eugene O'Neill

We are such things as rubbish is made of, so let's drink up and forget it. — Eugene O'Neill

The tragedy of life is what makes it worthwhile. I think that any life which merits living lies in the effort to realize some dream, and the higher that dream is, the harder it is to realize. Most decidedly we must all have our dreams. If one hasn't them, one might as well be dead. The only success is in failure. Any man who has a big enough dream must be a failure and must accept that as one of the conditions of being alive. If ever he thinks for a moment that he is a success, then he is finished — Eugene O'Neill

We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves. — Eugene O'Neill

I will be an artist or nothing! — Eugene O'Neill

Writing is my vacation from living — Eugene O'Neill

It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness. — Eugene O'Neill

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue. — Eugene O'Neill

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. — Eugene O'Neill

Dey's some things I don't got to be told. I kin read them in folks' eyes. — Eugene O'Neill

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot. — Eugene O'Neill

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober. — Eugene O'Neill

And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'it is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will."" (He grins at his father provocatively.) — Eugene O'Neill

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors. — Eugene O'Neill

As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death. — Eugene O'Neill

If that ghost have money I tells him never to haunt you
less'n he wants to lose it! — Eugene O'Neill

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. — Eugene O'Neill

Curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought it back. — Eugene O'Neill

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. — Eugene O'Neill

The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases. — Eugene O'Neill

I am so far from being a pessimist ... on the contrary, in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life. — Eugene O'Neill

While you are still beautiful and life still woos, it is such a fine gesture of disdainful pride to jilt it. — Eugene O'Neill

You'll say to yourself, I'm just an old man who is scared of life, but even more scared of dying. So I'm keeping drunk and hanging on to life at any price, and what of it? — Eugene O'Neill

Man's loneliness is but his fear of life. — Eugene O'Neill

We'd be making sail in the dawn, with a fair breeze, singing a chanty song wid no care to it. And astern the land would be sinking low and dying out, but we'd give it no heed but a laugh, and never look behind. For the day that was, was enough, for we was free men - and I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come - until they're old like me. — Eugene O'Neill

The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us. — Eugene O'Neill

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. — Eugene O'Neill

Curiosity killed the cat. — Eugene O'Neill

The trouble with you, I think, is you are still too dependent on others. You expect too much from outside you and demand too little of yourself. You hope everything will be made smooth and easy for you by someone else. Well, it's coming to the point where you are old enough, and have been around enough, to see that this will get you exactly nowhere. You will be what you make yourself and you have got to do that job absolutely alone and on your own, whether you're in school or holding down a job. — Eugene O'Neill

A man's work is in danger of deteriorating when he thinks he has found the one best formula for doing it. If he thinks that, he is likely to feel that all he needs is merely to go on repeating himself ... so long as a person is searching for better ways of doing his work, he is fairly safe. — Eugene O'Neill

But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers. — Eugene O'Neill

You're worse than decent. You're virtuous. — Eugene O'Neill

Life is a long drawn out lie, with a sniffling sigh at the end of it. — Eugene O'Neill

You're two of a kind, and a bad kind. — Eugene O'Neill

I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!.. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. 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, you 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 towards nowhere for no good reason. — Eugene O'Neill

Why can't you remember your Shakespeare and forget the third-raters. You'll find what you're trying to say in him- as you'll find everything else worth saying. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with sleep.'
- 'Fine! That's beautiful. But I wasn't trying to say that. We are such stuff as manure is made on, so let's drink up and forget it. That's more my idea. — Eugene O'Neill

The sea hates a coward. — Eugene O'Neill

A game of secret, cunning stratagems, in which only the fools who are fated to lose reveal their true aims or motives - even to themselves. — Eugene O'Neill

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death! — Eugene O'Neill

Well, they say a good cry does you a lot of good. — Eugene O'Neill

No dog is as well bred or as well mannered or as distinguished and handsome. — Eugene O'Neill

Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for time. — Eugene O'Neill

Irish as a Paddy's pig. — Eugene O'Neill

LAVINIA: I want to feel love! Love is all beautiful! I never used to know that! I was a fool! We'll be married soon ... We'll make an island for ourselves on land and we'll have children and love them and teach them to love life so that they can never be possessed by hate and death! — Eugene O'Neill

Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play. — Eugene O'Neill

In plain words, you've got to make up your mind to study whatever you undertake, and concentrate your mind on it, and really work at it. This isn't wisdom. Any damned fool in the world knows it's true, whether it's a question of raising horses or writing plays. You simply have to face the prospect of starting at the bottom and spending years learning how to do it. — Eugene O'Neill

Stay passed out, that's the right dope. There ain't any cool willow trees- except you grow your own in a bottle. — Eugene O'Neill

One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers. — Eugene O'Neill

And I took a seat in the grandstand of philosophical detachment to fall asleep observing the cannibals do their death dance. — Eugene O'Neill

Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who love love?.. Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or to be touched? — Eugene O'Neill

He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels. He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home. He's even proud of having this shabby place. He loves it here. — Eugene O'Neill

You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin. — Eugene O'Neill

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken. — Eugene O'Neill

(General Wetjoen talking about the Boer War)Let him come! I have seen them come before
at Margesfontein, Spion Kiopje, Modder River. Stepping into battle, left right left right, waving their silly swords, so afraid they couldn't show off how brave they was, and with mine rifle I kills them so easy! — Eugene O'Neill

I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come. — Eugene O'Neill

The devil! what beastly things our memories insist on cherishing! — Eugene O'Neill

Where am I? What the hell difference is it? There's plenty o' fresh air and the moon fur a glim. Don't be so damn pertic'lar! — Eugene O'Neill

That's right! Run him down! Run down everybody! Everyone is a fake to you! — Eugene O'Neill

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

When men make gods, there is no God! — Eugene O'Neill

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? — Eugene O'Neill

I spent a year in Professor Baker's famous class at Harvard. There, too, I learned some things that were useful to me-particularly what not to do. Not to take ten lines, for instance, to say something that can be said in one line. — Eugene O'Neill

I hate doctors! They'll do anything ... to keep you coming to them. They'll sell their souls. What's worse, they'll sell yours, and you never know it till one day you find yourself in hell. — Eugene O'Neill

You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really - except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better. — Eugene O'Neill

Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings. — Eugene O'Neill

LAVINIA: I love everything that grows simply
up toward the sun
everything that's straight and strong! I hate what's warped and twists and eats into itself and dies for a lifetime in shadow ... — Eugene O'Neill

There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now. — Eugene O'Neill

I discovered early in life that living frightened me when I was sober. — Eugene O'Neill

One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate - and remain forever scatheless. — Eugene O'Neill

The old - like children - talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own! — Eugene O'Neill

Happy roads is bunk. Weary roads is right. Get you nowhere fast. That's where I've got - nowhere. Where everyone lands in the end, even if most of the suckers won't admit it. — Eugene O'Neill

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? — Eugene O'Neill

God gave us mouths that close and ears that don't ... that should tell us something. — Eugene O'Neill

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. — Eugene O'Neill

LARRY
(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey) I'm afraid to live, am I?
and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself? — Eugene O'Neill

Well, you wanted me to be a hero in blue, so you better be resigned! Murdering doesn't improve one's manners! — Eugene O'Neill

It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. [ ... ] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more. — Eugene O'Neill

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! — Eugene O'Neill

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. — Eugene O'Neill

Critics? I love every bone in their heads. — Eugene O'Neill

HOGAN-No, I wouldn't think it, but my motto in life is never trust anyone too far, not even myself. — Eugene O'Neill

I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself - actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! — Eugene O'Neill

Age's terms of peace, after the long interlude of war with life, have still to be concluded-Youth must keep decently away-so many old wounds may have to be unbound, and old scars pointed to with pride, to prove to ourselves we have been brave and noble. — Eugene O'Neill

How thick the fog is. I can't see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It's getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness. — Eugene O'Neill

Dalmatians are not only superior to other dogs, they are like all dogs, infinitely less stupid than men. — Eugene O'Neill

Two days ago we waded through the mud out to this grave beneath the pines at the foot of the hill to place a Christmas wreath on it, hoping he would look down from the Paradise of Ten Billion Trees and Unrationable Dog Biscuits and pity us. — Eugene O'Neill

LAVINIA: He made me feel for the first time in my life that everything about love could be sweet and natural ... I have a right to love! — Eugene O'Neill

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. — Eugene O'Neill

I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room. — Eugene O'Neill

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. — Eugene O'Neill

Because any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy. But beyond that it is entirely up to you. You've got to do for yourself all the seeking and finding concerned with what you want to do. Anyone but yourself is useless to you there. — Eugene O'Neill