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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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George Jean Nathan
Age: 76 †
Born: 1882
Born: February 14
Died: 1958
Died: April 8
Critic
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Fort Wayne
Indiana
Nothing
Flower
Heavens
Real
Beings
Cynicism
Love
Poet
Optimism
Simply
Dogs
Stars
Flowers
Heaven
Dog
Transmutes
Human
Spring
Alchemist
Humans
Moon
Regarding

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Drama - what literature does at night.
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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.
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Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste, he should at once throw up his job and go to work inthe brewery.
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Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.
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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.
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A ready way to lose your friend is to lend him money. Another equally ready way to lose him is to refuse to lend him money. It is six of one and a half dozen of the other.
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A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.
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To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.
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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.
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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.
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Love demands infinitely less than friendship.
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An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.
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An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.
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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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The most loyal and faithful woman indulges her imagination in a hypothetical liaison whenever she dons a new street frock for the first time.
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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.
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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.
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Like everybody else, when I don't know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.
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It is only the cynicism that is born of success that is penetrating and valid.
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