User:Miszatomic/Themes


 * Alphabetized Themes unsourced quotes


 * Quotes from Cabell's works:


 * "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." — Coth in Cabell, The Silver Stallion
 * "... when I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No, Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are," — James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest
 * "... For a book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book 'means' thereafter, perforce,—both grammatically and actually,—whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it." — James Branch Cabell, "A Note on Cabellian Harmonics" in Cabellian Harmonics, April 1928


 * Quotes about Cabell by others:


 * "In the early part of the 20th century, there was a fantasy writer named James Branch Cabell who had a theory of writing as magic. His books (highly recommended, especially Jurgen) are both funny and mythological ... and it's easy to see how his process of creating characters was really a process of evocation and invocation." — Philip H. Farber
 * "Once we understand the fundamentals of Mr. Cabell's artistic aims, it is not easy to escape the fact that in Figures of Earth he undertook the staggering and almost unsuspected task of rewriting humanity's sacred books, just as in Jurgen he gave us a stupendous analogue of the ceaseless quest for beauty. For we must accept the truth that Mr. Cabell is not a novelist at all in the common acceptance of the term, but a historian of the human soul. His books are neither documentary nor representational; his characters are symbols of human desires and motives. By the not at all simple process of recording faithfully the projections of his rich and varied imagination, he has written thirteen books, which he accurately terms biography, wherein is the bitter-sweet truth about human life." — Burton Rascoe
 * "I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don't know why, exactly. The book hurts me — tears me to small pieces — but somehow it sets me free. It says the word that I've been trying to pronounce for so long. It tells me everything I am, and have been, and may be, unsparingly ... I don't know why I cry over it so much. It's too — something-or-other — to stand. I've been sitting here tonight, reading it aloud, with the tears streaming down my face ..." — Deems Taylor, Letter to Mary Kennedy, December 12, 1920

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Ability

 * Native ability without education is like a tree without fruit.
 * Aristippus


 * I thought it was impossible too before I did it.
 * Lance Armstrongm


 * Ability is of little account without opportunity.
 * Napoleon Bonaparte


 * An able man shows his spirit by gentle words and resolute actions.
 * Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield


 * It's no use saying we are doing our best. You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
 * Winston Churchill


 * The superior man is distressed by his want of ability.
 * Confucius, Analects.


 * A gifted horse will lead a good rider to victory. A great rider will give to the horse the gift of soundness.
 * Jean Luc Cornille


 * I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
 * Duke Ellington


 * Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
 * Ralph Waldo Emerson


 * Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.
 * Malcolm Forbes


 * The question "Who ought to be boss?" is like as "Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?" Obviously, the man who can sing tenor.
 * Henry Ford


 * Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right.
 * Henry Ford


 * The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.
 * Mahatma Gandhi


 * The less their ability, the more their conceit.
 * Asher Ginsberg


 * Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment.
 * Baltasar Gracián


 * Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the things you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not...
 * Thomas H. Huxley


 * No man is without some quality, by the due application of which he might deserve well of the world; and whoever he be that has but little in his power should be in haste to do that little, lest he be confounded with him that can do nothing.
 * Dr. Johnson


 * Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, in as much as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
 * John Keats


 * Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots and diffidence falls short.
 * John Henry Cardinal Newman, also attributed to Golda Meir


 * Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.
 * Sam Rayburn


 * Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
 * Theodore Roosevelt


 * Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
 * Bertrand Russell


 * Natural ability can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation; but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural ability.
 * Schopenhauer


 * The measure of capacity is the measure of sphere to either man or woman.
 * Elizabeth Oakes Smith


 * I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
 * Henry David Thoreau


 * Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.
 * John Wooden


 * Ability is a poor man's wealth.
 * Matthew Wren


 * Everyone must row with the oars he has.
 * English Proverb


 * There are no stupid questions, only stupid people.
 * Anonymous.


 * When one must, one can.
 * Proverb in many languages.

Acting

 * To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
 * Marlon Brando.


 * The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.
 * Marlon Brando


 * You can sit there and have a universal experience, of fear, of anger, of tears, of love, and I discovered that its the audience, really, that is doing the acting.
 * Marlon Brando.


 * If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.
 * Marlon Brando.


 * An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.
 * Marlon Brando.


 * If you're successful, acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you unsuccessful it's worse than having a skin disease.
 * Marlon Brando.


 * Pray to God and say the lines.
 * Bette Davis, 'advice to the actress Celeste Holm. Attrib.


 * I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn't dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.
 * Bette Davis.


 * Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.
 * Bette Davis.


 * It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor.
 * John Ford, attributed


 * Actors are crap.
 * John Ford.


 * If there wasn't something called acting they would probably hospitalize people like me. The giddiness and the joy of life is the moving and grooving, the exploration.
 * Whoopi Goldberg.


 * You're an actor, are you? Well, all that means is: you are irresponsible, irrational, romantic, and incapable of handling an adult emotion or a universal concept without first reducing it to something personal, material, sensational — and probably sexual!
 * George Herman.


 * All actors are cattle. Actually, all actors are not cattle, but should be treated as such.
 * Alfred Hitchcock.


 * When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, But what's my motivation?, I say, 'Your salary.'
 * Alfred Hitchcock


 * Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, actors!
 * Jesus


 * An actor onstage can no more act upon the order 'Be happy' than she can upon the order 'Do not think of a hippopotamus.'
 * David Mamet.


 * We used to have actresses trying to become stars; now we have stars trying to become actresses.
 * Laurence Olivier.


 * Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.
 * Kate Reid.


 * An actress must never lose her ego — without it she has no talent.
 * Norma Shearer


 * I do a job. I get paid. I go home.
 * Maureen Stapleton.


 * Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
 * Orson Welles.


 * Every now and then, when you're onstage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live.
 * Shelley Winters