Top 50 George Jean Nathan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.”

— George Jean Nathan

2. “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

3. “Drama – what literature does at night.”

— George Jean Nathan

4. “Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.”

— George Jean Nathan

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5. “What passes for woman’s intuition is often nothing more than man’s transparency.”

— George Jean Nathan

6. “Love is the emotion that a woman feels always for a poodle dog and sometimes for a man.”

— George Jean Nathan

7. “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

8. “An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.”

— George Jean Nathan

9. “Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.”

— George Jean Nathan

10. “No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.”

— George Jean Nathan

11. “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

12. “The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.”

— George Jean Nathan

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

— George Jean Nathan

14. “Love demands infinitely less than friendship.”

— George Jean Nathan

15. “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

16. “Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.”

— George Jean Nathan

17. “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.”

— George Jean Nathan

18. “A broken heart is a monument to a love that will never die; fulfillment is a monument to a love that is already on its deathbed.”

— George Jean Nathan

19. “Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.”

— George Jean Nathan

20. “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

21. “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.”

— George Jean Nathan

22. “Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open.”

— George Jean Nathan

23. “Criticism is the art of appraising others at one’s own value.”

— George Jean Nathan

24. “Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.”

— George Jean Nathan

25. “A man may be said to love most truly that woman in whose company he can feel drowsy in comfort.”

— George Jean Nathan

26. “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

27. “Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.”

— George Jean Nathan

28. “Men go to the theatre to forget; women, to remember.”

— George Jean Nathan

29. “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

30. “A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.”

— George Jean Nathan

31. “The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.”

— George Jean Nathan

32. “In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.”

— George Jean Nathan

33. “The triumph of sugar over diabetes.”

— George Jean Nathan

34. “I drink to make other people interesting.”

— George Jean Nathan

35. “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

36. “Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.”

— George Jean Nathan

37. “Musicals are to the theater what wines are to a substantial dinner.”

— George Jean Nathan

38. “A ham is simply any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts.”

— George Jean Nathan

39. “All one has to do to gather a large crowd in New York is to stand on the curb a few minutes and gaze intently at the sky.”

— George Jean Nathan

40. “A man’s wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.”

— George Jean Nathan

41. “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.”

— George Jean Nathan

42. “Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn’t understand, he wants to know if she’s tired.”

— George Jean Nathan

43. “There is no legimate actor who can resist the powerful lure of the movies. It isn’t the money that fetches him. It isn’t the great publicity. It is simply this: the movies enable an actor to look at himself.”

— George Jean Nathan

44. “The dramatic critic who is without prejudice is on the plane with the general who does not believe in taking human life.”

— George Jean Nathan

45. “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

46. “Like everybody else, when I don’t know what else to do, I seem to go in for catching colds.”

— George Jean Nathan

47. “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

48. “Shaw writes plays for the ages, the ages between five and twelve.”

— George Jean Nathan

49. “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

50. “An abstainer is the sort of man you wouldn’t want to drink with even if he did.”

— George Jean Nathan