Eric Bentley famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.
-- Eric Bentley

#Communication #Ideas #Age
If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the worldis provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.
-- Eric Bentley

#Drama #Moving #Theatre
If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.
-- Eric Bentley

#Hope #Cancer #Hands
Even in a jungle, lovely flowers will spring up here and there, such being the fecundity of nature, and however badly our pastors and masters run our society, however much they pull to pieces that which they claim to be keeping intact, nature remains fecund, human beings are born with human traits, sometimes human strength outweighs human weakness, and human grace shows itself amid human ugliness. â€˜In the bloodiest times,â€™ as our play has it, â€˜there are kind people.â€™
-- Eric Bentley

#Running #Spring #Flower
A play has two authors, the playwright and the actor.
-- Eric Bentley

#Play #Two #Theatre
Fashion, which elevates the bad to the level of the good, subsequently turns its back on bad and good alike.
-- Eric Bentley

#Fashion #Levels #Turns
Like dreams, farces show the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes.
-- Eric Bentley

#Dream #Wish #Farce
Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.
-- Eric Bentley

#Maps #Biographies #Geography

We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war, terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century.
But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.
We brought the religious leaders and the secular development workers together in one room. We asked the religious leaders what are your reservations about development workers? And we asked the development workers, what are your reservations about religious leaders? It turns out that most of the problems are not really problems at all, but rather misunderstandings, misconceptions, and mis-communications.
For me, becoming a man had a lot to do with learning communication, and I learned about that by acting.
Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.
I have to say, this sounds like the worst idea in a thousand generations of bad ideas." "You haven't heard all our ideas." Luke & Bhindi Drayson
The greatest need of our age and of every age, the greatest need of every human heart, is to know the resources and sufficiency of God.
The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.
I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.
It's true, some wine improves with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.

Eric Bentley famous quotes

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