Top 100 Brecht's Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Brecht's

#1. I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.

Nicholas Royle

#2. Bertolt Brecht's observation in The Threepenny Opera that eating takes precedence over morality. Emerging

Satyajit Das

#3. The dilemma of Brechtian performance is that, for all of Brecht's emphasis on rationality and the undermining of theatrical illusion, the actor must convincingly portray something that she is not.

Philip Auslander

#4. First feed the face, then talk right and wrong.

Bertolt Brecht

#5. Who built the seven gates of Thebes? In the books are listed the names of kings. Did the kings heave up the building blocks?

Bertolt Brecht

#6. Impact lies in the vicinity of mistakes.

Bertolt Brecht

#7. Let nothing be called natural In an age of bloody confusion, Ordered disorder, planned caprice, And dehumanized humanity, lest all things Be held unalterable!

Bertolt Brecht

#8. Who does Not Know the Truth, is simply a Fool ... Yet who Knows the Truth and Calls it a Lie, is a Criminal.

Bertolt Brecht

#9. I don't trust him. We're friends.

Bertolt Brecht

#10. From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun.

Bertolt Brecht

#11. and you i beg make not your anger manifest. For all that lives needs help from all the rest.

Bertolt Brecht

#12. The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.

Bertolt Brecht

#13. The righteous one has no sense of humor.

Bertolt Brecht

#14. What is robbing a bank compared to founding one?

Bertolt Brecht

#15. You have to attack once the truth is too weak to defend itself.

Bertolt Brecht

#16. Science knows only one commandment - contribute to science.

Bertolt Brecht

#17. I hesitate to say because it sounds silly, but the first play I did was 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle' by Brecht.

Justin Kirk

#18. The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.

Bertolt Brecht

#19. In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht

#20. The shrill voices of those who give orders
Are full of fear like the squeakings of
Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses
Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs ...
Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but
The rulers too.

Bertolt Brecht

#21. It is easier to rob by setting up a bank than by holding up a bank clerk.

Bertolt Brecht

#22. Sitting and sedition don't mix.

Bertolt Brecht

#23. Everyone chases after happiness,
not noticing that happiness is right at their heels

Bertolt Brecht

#24. The mill wheel turns, it turns forever, though what is uppermost remains not so.

Bertolt Brecht

#25. Terrible is the temptation to be good.

Bertolt Brecht

#26. Even hatred of vileness Distorts a mans features.

Bertolt Brecht

#27. All the world says: yes we know what's written in the books but now let's see what our eyes tell us.

Bertolt Brecht

#28. Love is also like a coconut which is good while it is fresh, but you have to spit it out when the juice is gone, what's left tastes bitter.

Bertolt Brecht

#29. We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.

Bertolt Brecht

#30. In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed.

Alain Badiou

#31. But something's missing ( Aber etwas fehlt ).

Bertolt Brecht

#32. Love is the desire to give, not to receive, something. Love is the art of producing something with the other's talents.

Bertolt Brecht

#33. The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.

Bertolt Brecht

#34. Sometimes it's more important to be human, than to have good taste.

Bertolt Brecht

#35. For what's the use of talking with a man who has a disease and thinks about the stars?

Bertolt Brecht

#36. It's all right to hesitate if you then go ahead.

Bertolt Brecht

#37. What's a joy to the one is a nightmare to the other.

Bertolt Brecht

#38. There is perhaps nothing that is not musical. Perhaps there's no moment in life that's not musical ... All instruments, musical or not, become instruments.

George Brecht

#39. In my poetry a rhyme
Would seem to me almost insolent.
Inside me contend
Delight at the apple tree in blossom
And horror at the house-painter's speeches.
But only the second
Drives me to my desk.

Bertolt Brecht

#40. Though the rich of this earth find no difficulty in creating misery, they can't bear to see it.

Bertolt Brecht

#41. I want to go with the one I love.
I do not want to calculate the cost.
I do not want to think about whether it's good.
I do not want to know whether he loves me.
I want to go with whom I love ...

Bertolt Brecht

#42. Subtle! Subtlety is bourgeois. Brecht us that when he popped drama's cherry. He fucked drama until it stopped being subtle, like a lady, and started being useful, like a whore.

David Burr Gerrard

#43. People are too durable, that's their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves, they last too long.

Bertolt Brecht

#44. To those who does not know the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.

Bertolt Brecht

#45. Don't tell me peace has broken out.

Bertolt Brecht

#46. Little changes are the enemies of great changes.

Bertolt Brecht

#47. A person is really dead only when nobody thinks of him anymore.

Bertolt Brecht

#48. No one will improve your lot if you do not yourself.

Bertolt Brecht

#49. People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart.

Bertolt Brecht

#50. We're not responsible, he thought. This planet is a temporary affair. It's whizzing with all kinds of other ones, a whole range of planetary stuff, toward a star in the Milky Way. On that kind of a planet we're not responsible, he thought.

Bertolt Brecht

#51. Girl Tractorist: As the poet Mayakovsky said: "The home of the Soviet people shall be the home of Reason"!

Bertolt Brecht

#52. Never believe on faith, see for yourself! What you yourself don't learn you don't know.

Bertolt Brecht

#53. There are men who struggle for a day and they are good. There are men who struggle for a year and they are better. There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives: These are the indispensable ones.

Bertolt Brecht

#54. Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero!
No, Andrea ... unhappy is the land that needs a hero.

Bertolt Brecht

#55. Happy is the people who need no heroes.

Bertolt Brecht

#56. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

Bertolt Brecht

#57. It's never too late for those whose time has come.

Bertolt Brecht

#58. Spring is noticed, if at all By people sitting in railway trains.

Bertolt Brecht

#59. You couldn't escape the literary atmosphere in our home. I grew up as a Britisher. I played a protagonist of every nationality in stage adaptations of Shakespeare and Brecht. I graduated from Yale. When I moved to the U.S., I realized with some amount of surprise that I was seen as an ethnic actor.

Satya Bhabha

#60. Carpenter: "Call Shen Te, someone! She's good!"
Shui Ta: "Certainly. She's ruined.

Bertolt Brecht

#61. Oh why do we not say the important things, it would be so easy, and we are damned because we do not.

Bertolt Brecht

#62. Those who are weak don't fight.
Those who are stronger might fight
for an hour.
Those who are stronger still might fight
for many years.
The strongest fight
their whole life.
They are the indispensable ones.

Bertolt Brecht

#63. Poverty makes you wise but it's a curse.

Bertolt Brecht

#64. If you fight you might lose, if you don't you have already lost.

Bertolt Brecht

#65. Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?

Bertolt Brecht

#66. If you join the rat race - you're in the race of rats.

Bertolt Brecht

#67. Unhappiness doesn't grow on the chest like leprosy. Poverty won't fall off the roof like a loose tile, no; poverty and unhappiness are man's doing.

Bertolt Brecht

#68. A man who doesn't know the truth is just an idiot, but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook.

Bertolt Brecht

#69. Great sport begins at a point where it has ceased to be healthy.

Bertolt Brecht

#70. That cloud, however, blossomed just for minutes
And when I gazed up, faded in the wind.

Bertolt Brecht

#71. The rain Never falls upwards. When the wound Stops hurting What hurts is The scar.

Bertolt Brecht

#72. You don't need to pray to God any more when there are storms in the sky, but you do have to be insured.

Bertolt Brecht

#73. I'm teaching all the time. When am I to learn?

Bertolt Brecht

#74. You who will emerge from the flood
In which we have gone under
Remember
When you speak of our failings
The dark time too
Which you have escaped

Bertolt Brecht

#75. My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it.

George Brecht

#76. Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it.

Bertolt Brecht

#77. Sometimes I have visions of myself driving through hell, selling sulphur and brimstone, or through heaven peddling refreshments to the roaming souls. If me and the children I've got left could find a place where there's no shooting, I wouldn't mind a few years of peace and quiet.

Bertolt Brecht

#78. The fanatics for progress often have too little appreciation of the existing.

Bertolt Brecht

#79. Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sure sign something's wrong.

Bertolt Brecht

#80. For the wickedness of the world is so great you have to run your legs off in order to avoid having them stolen from under you.

Bertolt Brecht

#81. People who fight may lose. People who do not fight have already lost.

Bertolt Brecht

#82. [Bertholt] Brecht looked very thin, like a herring with very sensitive hands.

Lotte Lenya

#83. Such a lot is won when even a single man gets to his feet and says No

Bertolt Brecht

#84. The rope has been torn; a knot
Can tie it again, but
It's been torn.
Perhaps we'll meet again, but
You won't find me
In the place where we parted ways.

Bertolt Brecht

#85. What's breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?

Bertolt Brecht

#86. Those against politics are in favor of the politics inflicted upon them.

Bertolt Brecht

#87. Boy meets girl. So what?

Bertolt Brecht

#88. A good soldier has his heart and soul in it. When he receives an order, he gets a hard on, and when he drives his lance through his enemy's guts, he comes.

Bertolt Brecht

#89. I hope I can pull the wagon by myself. Yes, I'll manage, there's not much in it now. I must get back into business.

Bertolt Brecht

#90. I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.

Marianne Faithfull

#91. The storm that bends the birch trees Is held to be violent But how about the storm That bends the backs of the roadworkers?

Bertolt Brecht

#92. One must live well to know what living is.

Bertolt Brecht

#93. When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world' it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

Bertolt Brecht

#94. Here today we huddle tight As the darkest heathens might The snow falls chilly on our skin The snow is forcing its way in. Hush, snow, come in with us to dwell: We were thrown out by Heaven as well.

Bertolt Brecht