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It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.

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
Penetrating
Valid
Cynicism
Achievement
Success
Born

More quotes by 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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An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.
George Jean Nathan
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Art is the sex of the imagination.
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.
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A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.
George Jean Nathan
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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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A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.
George Jean Nathan
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Men go to the theatre to forget women, to remember.
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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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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An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.
George Jean Nathan
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Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.
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.
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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Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.
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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The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.
George Jean Nathan
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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.
George Jean Nathan
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I drink so the others become interesting.
George Jean Nathan
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The Russian dramatist is one who, walking through a cemetery, does not see the flowers on the graves. The American dramatist . . . Does not see the graves under the flowers.
George Jean Nathan