1.
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.
George Jean Nathan
Examination is the windows and chandeliers of art: it sheds light on the encompassing obscurity in which art might otherwise linger only vaguely visible, and maybe completely overlooked.
2.
Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.
George Jean Nathan
3.
Love demands infinitely less than friendship.
George Jean Nathan
4.
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Jean Nathan
5.
A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.
George Jean Nathan
6.
Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.
George Jean Nathan
7.
Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
George Jean Nathan
8.
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.
George Jean Nathan
9.
Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.
George Jean Nathan
10.
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
George Jean Nathan
11.
The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.
George Jean Nathan
12.
I drink to make other people interesting.
George Jean Nathan
13.
No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.
George Jean Nathan
14.
The most loyal and faithful woman indulges her imagination in a hypothetical liaison whenever she dons a new street frock for the first time.
George Jean Nathan
15.
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.
George Jean Nathan
16.
It is also said of me that I now and then contradict myself. Yes, I improve wonderfully as time goes on.
George Jean Nathan
17.
In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.
George Jean Nathan
18.
A ham is simply any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts.
George Jean Nathan
19.
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
George Jean Nathan
20.
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.
George Jean Nathan
21.
Art is the sex of the imagination.
George Jean Nathan
22.
An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.
George Jean Nathan
23.
To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.
George Jean Nathan
24.
Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.
George Jean Nathan
25.
It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.
George Jean Nathan
26.
An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.
George Jean Nathan
27.
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.
George Jean Nathan
28.
Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open.
George Jean Nathan
29.
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.
George Jean Nathan
30.
What passes for woman's intuition is more often intrinsically nothing more than man's transparency.
George Jean Nathan
31.
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.
George Jean Nathan
32.
Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.
George Jean Nathan
33.
Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.
George Jean Nathan
34.
The triumph of sugar over diabetes.
George Jean Nathan
35.
So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.
George Jean Nathan
36.
The bachelors admired freedom is often a yoke, for the freer a man is to himself the greater slave he often is to the whims of others.
George Jean Nathan
37.
Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.
George Jean Nathan
38.
Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste, he should at once throw up his job and go to work inthe brewery.
George Jean Nathan
39.
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.
George Jean Nathan
40.
Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.
George Jean Nathan
41.
I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.
George Jean Nathan
42.
Sex touches the heavens only when it simultaneously touches the gutter and the mud.
George Jean Nathan
43.
Impersonal criticism?is like an impersonal fist fight or an impersonal marriage, and as successful.
George Jean Nathan
44.
A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.
George Jean Nathan
45.
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.
George Jean Nathan
46.
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.
George Jean Nathan
47.
Drama - what literature does at night.
George Jean Nathan
48.
An abstainer is the sort of man you wouldn't want to drink with even if he did.
George Jean Nathan
49.
Hollywood is ten million dollars worth of intricate and high ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.
George Jean Nathan
50.
The Russian dramatist is one who, walking through a cemetery, does not see the flowers on the graves. The American dramatist . . . Does not see the graves under the flowers.
George Jean Nathan
