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An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.

George Jean Nathan

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George Jean Nathan
Age: 76 †
Born: 1882
Born: February 14
Died: 1958
Died: April 8
Critic
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Fort Wayne
Indiana
Fellows
Literature
Looking
Believe
Way
Optimist
Optimism
Believes
Fellow

More quotes by George Jean Nathan

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The most loyal and faithful woman indulges her imagination in a hypothetical liaison whenever she dons a new street frock for the first time.
George Jean Nathan
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Hollywood is ten million dollars worth of intricate and high ingenious machinery functioning elaborately to put skin on baloney.
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A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.
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I drink so the others become interesting.
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No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.
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All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.
George Jean Nathan
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There is something distinguished about even his failures they sink not trivially, but with a certain air of majesty, like a great ship, its flags flying, full of holes.
George Jean Nathan
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It is the mark of a superior person that, left to themselves they are able endlessly to amuse, interest and entertain themselves out of their personal stock of meditations, ideas, criticisms, memories, philosophy, humor and what not.
George Jean Nathan
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Drama - what literature does at night.
George Jean Nathan
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A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.
George Jean Nathan
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The bachelors admired freedom is often a yoke, for the freer a man is to himself the greater slave he often is to the whims of others.
George Jean Nathan
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So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.
George Jean Nathan
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Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.
George Jean Nathan
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An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.
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Men go to the theatre to forget women, to remember.
George Jean Nathan
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Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.
George Jean Nathan
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A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of Spring, love, and dogs.
George Jean Nathan
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I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.
George Jean Nathan
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Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open.
George Jean Nathan
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One does not go to the theater to see life and nature one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.
George Jean Nathan