Top 80 Eugene O'Neill Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again-now.”

— Eugene O'Neill

2. “Curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought it back.”

— Eugene O'Neill

3. “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The Grace of God is glue.”

— Eugene O'Neill

4. “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

— Eugene O'Neill

5. “Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.”

— Eugene O'Neill

6. “We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves.”

— Eugene O'Neill

7. “The sea hates a coward.”

— Eugene O'Neill

8. “The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”

— Eugene O'Neill

9. “It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!”

— Eugene O'Neill

10. “Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of the earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love?”

— Eugene O'Neill

11. “Curiosity killed the cat.”

— Eugene O'Neill

12. “Writing is my vacation from living.”

— Eugene O'Neill

13. “We talk about the American Dream, and want to tell the world about the American Dream, but what is that Dream, in most cases, but the dream of material things? I sometimes think that the United States for this reason is the greatest failure the world has ever seen.”

— Eugene O'Neill

14. “I will be an artist or nothing!”

— Eugene O'Neill

15. “Those who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers.”

— Eugene O'Neill

16. “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.”

— Eugene O'Neill

17. “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room – and God damn it – died in a hotel room.”

— Eugene O'Neill

18. “No matter how deep my sleep I shall hear you, and not all the power of death can keep my spirit from wagging a grateful tail. I will always love you as only a dog can.”

— Eugene O'Neill

19. “Happiness hates the timid. So does science.”

— Eugene O'Neill

20. “Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted – to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.”

— Eugene O'Neill

21. “Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.”

— Eugene O'Neill

22. “Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.”

— Eugene O'Neill

23. “We are where centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand lives, our eyes begin to open.”

— Eugene O'Neill

24. “When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you haven’t thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity – but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.”

— Eugene O'Neill

25. “One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.”

— Eugene O'Neill

26. “We are such things as rubbish is made of, so let’s drink up and forget it.”

— Eugene O'Neill

27. “The only living life is in the past and future – the present is an interlude – strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness that we are living.”

— Eugene O'Neill

28. “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.”

— Eugene O'Neill

29. “Irish as a Paddy’s pig.”

— Eugene O'Neill

30. “Life is perhaps best regarded as a bad dream between two awakenings.”

— Eugene O'Neill

31. “We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.”

— Eugene O'Neill

32. “It’s a great game – the pursuit of happiness.”

— Eugene O'Neill

33. “Dalmatians are not only superior to other dogs, they are like all dogs, infinitely less stupid than men.”

— Eugene O'Neill

34. “What beastly incidents our memories insist on cherishing, the ugly, and the disgusting; the beautiful things we have to keep diaries to remember.”

— Eugene O'Neill

35. “Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates!”

— Eugene O'Neill

36. “To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”

— Eugene O'Neill

37. “Only the past when you were happy is real.”

— Eugene O'Neill

38. “As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.”

— Eugene O'Neill

39. “Suppose I was to tell you that it’s just beauty that’s calling me, the beauty of the far off and unknown, the mystery and spell which lures me, the need of freedom of great wide spaces, the joy of wandering on and on – -in quest of the secret which is hidden over there – -beyond the horizon?”

— Eugene O'Neill

40. “How thick the fog is. I can’t see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It’s getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness.”

— Eugene O'Neill

41. “If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself – ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity – before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.”

— Eugene O'Neill

42. “When men make gods, there is no God!”

— Eugene O'Neill

43. “Life is a long drawn out lie, with a sniffling sigh at the end of it.”

— Eugene O'Neill

44. “Our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electric display of God the Father.”

— Eugene O'Neill

45. “Critics? I love every bone in their heads.”

— Eugene O'Neill

46. “I know it’s useless to talk. But sometimes I feel so lonely.”

— Eugene O'Neill

47. “Yes, facts don’t mean a thing, do they? What you want to believe, that’s the only truth!”

— Eugene O'Neill

48. “Two days ago we waded through the mud out to this grave beneath the pines at the foot of the hill to place a Christmas wreath on it, hoping he would look down from the Paradise of Ten Billion Trees and Unrationable Dog Biscuits and pity us.”

— Eugene O'Neill

49. “You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn’t becoming to you, really – except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There’s a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better.”

— Eugene O'Neill

50. “I spent a year in Professor Baker’s famous class at Harvard. There, too, I learned some things that were useful to me-particularly what not to do. Not to take ten lines, for instance, to say something that can be said in one line.”

— Eugene O'Neill