George Jean Nathan
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.Collection: Patriotism
Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.Collection: Men
It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.Collection: Success
Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.Collection: Humor
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.Collection: Love
Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.Collection: Good
To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.Collection: Art
Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.Collection: Men
No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.Collection: Anger
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.Collection: Music
Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.Collection: Love
Love demands infinitely less than friendship.Collection: Friendship
Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.Collection: Art
An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.Collection: Funny
I drink to make other people interesting.
The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.
What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's transparency.
Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.
A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.
Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.
Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.
An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.
A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.
I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.
I know many married men, I even know a few happily married men, but I don't know one who wouldn't fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave him a wink.
Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.
A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.
So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.
All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.Collection: Stupidity
It is the mark of a superior person that, left to themselves they are able endlessly to amuse, interest and entertain themselves out of their personal stock of meditations, ideas, criticisms, memories, philosophy, humor and what not.Collection: Memories
The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.Collection: Men
All one has to do to gather a large crowd in New York is to stand on the curb a few minutes and gaze intently at the sky.Collection: New York
A ready way to lose your friend is to lend him money. Another equally ready way to lose him is to refuse to lend him money. It is six of one and a half dozen of the other.Collection: Friends
In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.Collection: Believe
An abstainer is the sort of man you wouldn't want to drink with even if he did.Collection: Men
Art is the sex of the imagination.Collection: Art
I drink so the others become interesting.Collection: Interesting
Men go to the theatre to forget; women, to remember.Collection: Men
The most loyal and faithful woman indulges her imagination in a hypothetical liaison whenever she dons a new street frock for the first time.Collection: Fashion
Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.Collection: Health
A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of Spring, love, and dogs.Collection: Dog
The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.Collection: Memories
Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.Collection: Drama
Drama - what literature does at night.Collection: Drama
The triumph of sugar over diabetes.Collection: Sarcastic
It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.Collection: Wise
A broken heart is a monument to a love that will never die; fulfillment is a monument to a love that is already on its deathbed.Collection: Love
Hollywood is ten million dollars worth of intricate and high ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.Collection: Skins