Dramaturge

🇦🇺William Shakespeare

Literature

English Renaissance

1948–2010

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."

🇫🇷Gustave Flaubert

Literature

Realism

1821–1880

"The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him. (18 March 1857)"

🇬🇧Anthony Burgess

Music

1917–1993

"The window opened gently and a still Autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil."

🇺🇸Thomas Wolfe

Literature

1900–1938

"The exquisite smell of the south, clean but funky, like a big woman."

🇺🇸Mario Vargas Llosa

Literature

magic realism

1936–2025

"Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams."

🇺🇸Wendy Wasserstein

Education

1950–2006

"Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable."

🇬🇷Epicharmus of Kos

Philosophy

Old Comedy

-539–-447

"I have no desire to die, but I count my death as nothing."

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Philosophy

Enlightenment

1729–1781

"Trust no friend without faults, and love a maiden, but no angel."

🇺🇸Stephen Sondheim

Music

1930–2021

"Without question, Steve is the best Broadway lyricist, past or present."

🇩🇪Hugo Ball

Literature

Dada

1886–1927

"It is a mistake to believe in my presence.. .If I take a seat at a party, I can see, even from afar, that only a ghost is sitting there."

Oliver Goldsmith

Literature

1728–1774

"I'll be with you in the squeezing of a lemon."

Ivan Krylov

Journalism

1769–1844

"It is only when our consciences become tangled that the truth begins to hurt."

🇵🇹José Saramago

Literature

magic realism

1922–2010

"After all, we are always on time, behind time, in time, but never out of time, no matter how often we are told that we are."

🇺🇸Frances Hodgson Burnett

Literature

1849–1924

"Ben Weatherstaff says he is so conceited he would rather have stones thrown at him than not be noticed."

🇬🇧Peter Shaffer

Literature

1926–2016

"The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you."

🇫🇷Octave Mirbeau

Literature

Impressionism

1848–1917

"“During Humankind’s long centuries societies have risen and fallen, all alike in this one fact which rules all history: the great are protected, the small are crushed."

🇷🇺Maxim Gorky

Literature

socialist realism

1868–1936

"One has to be able to count, if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty."

🇩🇪Gustav Landauer

Philosophy

Materialism

1870–1919

"Now it can become clear to man that freedom and peace of the nations can only come when as Jesus and his followers, and in our time above all Tolstoi advised, they choose to fully abstain from any violence."

🇺🇸Alan Watts

Philosophy

Eastern philosophy

1915–1973

"This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."

🇺🇸Joseph Brodsky

Literature

1940–1996

"Some prose and essays by Brodsky in Russian"

🇬🇧Thomas Middleton

Literature

1580–1627

"’Tis slight, not strength, that gives the greatest lift."

Molière

Literature

Classicism

1622–1673

"Moliere's Verses Plays - Publication, Statistics, Words Research"

🇫🇷Honoré de Balzac

journalism

literary realism

1799–1850

"The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us."

Ivan Turgenev

Literature

literary realism

1818–1883

"Death is an old joke, but it comes like new to everyone."

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Literature

1751–1816

"No caparisons, miss, if you please. Caparisons don't become a young woman."