O comfort-killing Night, image of hell!
Dim register and notary of shame!
Black stage for tragedies and murders fell!
Vast, sin-concealing chaos! nurse of blame!
Blind, muffled bawd! dark harbor for defame!
Grim cave of death! whispering conspirator,
With close-tongued treason and the ravisher! [ William Shakespeare ]
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano:
A stage where every man must play a part. [ William Shakespeare ]
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more! It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. [ William Shakespeare, Macbeth ]
On the stage man should stand a step higher than in life. [ Börne ]
At every stage of life he reaches, man finds himself but a novice. [ Chamfort ]
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. [ William Shakespeare ]
All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene. [ W. E. Channing ]
Men drop so fast, ere life's mid stage we tread, Few know so many friends alive, as dead. [ Young ]
The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and love. [ George MacDonald ]
Great men do not play stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death; only little men do that. [ John Ruskin ]
Madness is the last stage of human debasement. It is the abdication of humanity. Better to die a thousand times! [ Napoleon ]
I maintain, against the enemies of the stage, that patterns of piety, decently represented, may second the precepts. [ Dryden ]
Comedies acted on life's stage, behind the scenes, are much more spirited than those acted in sight of the audience. [ De Finod ]
There is so much of the glare and grief of life connected with the stage that it fills me with most solemn thoughts. [ Henry Giles ]
A friendship formed in childhood, in youth, - by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]
On the Greek stage, a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in the course of one day. [ Coleridge ]
Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature. [ Sears ]
Each department of knowledge passes in succession through three different theoretic stages: the theologic stage, or fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; the scientific, or positive. [ A. Comte ]
Resentment is, in every stage of the passion, painful, but it is not disagreeable, unless in excess; pity is always painful, yet always agreeable; vanity, on the contrary, is always pleasant, yet always disagreeable. [ Horne ]
Maggie and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion, - when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial words, the lightest gestures, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent. [ George Eliot ]