The collection / 12 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

12 results · Page 1 of 1Play this collection ▷

01Undated

If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

02Undated

Television is for appearing on - not for looking at.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

03Undated

What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

04Undated

Success is far more perilous than failure, isn’t it? You’ve got to be doubly strong and watchful and wary.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

05Undated

All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to break tyranny.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

06Undated

Strange how potent cheap music is.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

07Undated

An echo from the past when, innocentWe looked upon the present with delightAnd doubted not the future would be kinderAnd never knew the loneliness of night.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

08Undated

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

09Undated

I don't know what London's coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

10Undated

The human race is a letdown, Ernest — a bad, bad letdown. And I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed, but it hasn’t. It thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime, but it hasn’t. It’s wallowing in it. It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and to our eyes and to our souls. We’ve invented a few things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet. Endless, peaceful quiet. Something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

11Undated

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

Noël Coward / quote

↗

12Undated

Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade.

Noël Coward / quote

↗