There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.

When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery ... He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift.... There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. -stage manager, in the play OUR TOWN

For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?

true influence over another comes not from a moments eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a lifetime's thoughts stored up in the eyes...the secret smile in the eyes of a friend

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.