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Age
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The old -- like children -- talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!
-Eugene O'Neill
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Contentment
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One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.
-Eugene O'Neill
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Fairy Tales
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Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.
-Eugene O'Neill
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God
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When men make gods, there is no God!
-Eugene O'Neill
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Life
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Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
-Eugene O'Neill
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I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame;
I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame;
But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves,
Where the rainbows play in the flying spray,
'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.
-Eugene O'Neill, Free
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If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.
-Eugene O'Neill
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Loneliness
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Man's loneliness is but his fear of life.
-Eugene O'Neill
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Oceans
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I lay on the bowsprit, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight towering above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment lost myself- actually lost my life. I was set free... dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm and the high dim-starred sky... I belonged within a unity and joy to life itself.
-Eugene O'Neill
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Shyness
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Happiness hates the timid! So does science!
-Eugene O'Neill, Strange Interlude, 1928
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Stars
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For a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life . . . to life itself. I caught a glimpse of something greater than myself.
-Eugene O'Neill, quoting the source for this: said when he stood looking up at the stars for the the first time
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Books by and about Eugene O'Neill