Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into U.S. drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day’s Journey into Night is often numbered on the short list of the finest U.S. May these Eugene O’Neill Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. “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
2. “Those who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers.” Eugene O’Neill
3. “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
4. “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
5. “Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.” Eugene O’Neill
6. “Life is a long drawn out lie, with a sniffling sigh at the end of it.” Eugene O’Neill
7. “Writing is my vacation from living.” Eugene O’Neill
8. “Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.” Eugene O’Neill
9. “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
10. “While you are still beautiful and life still woos, it is such a fine gesture of disdainful pride to jilt it.” Eugene O’Neill
11. “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
12. “There is no present or future only the past, happening over and over again-now.” Eugene O’Neill
13. “Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.” Eugene O’Neill
14. “It’s a great game – the pursuit of happiness.” Eugene O’Neill
15. “Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.” Eugene O’Neill
16. “You said they had found the secret of happiness because they had never heard that love can be a sin.” Eugene O’Neill
17. “We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves.” Eugene O’Neill
18. “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.” Eugene O’Neill
19. “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
20. “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
21. “We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.” Eugene O’Neill
22. “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
23. “I will be an artist or nothing!” Eugene O’Neill
24. “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
25. “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
26. “Critics? I love every bone in their heads.” Eugene O’Neill
27. “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
28. “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
29. “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
30. “We are where centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand lives, our eyes begin to open.” Eugene O’Neill
31. “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
32. “Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.” Eugene O’Neill
33. “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
34. “Happiness hates the timid. So does science.” Eugene O’Neill
35. “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.” Eugene O’Neill
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