Noël Coward Quotes

If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.

~ Noël Coward

Success is far more perilous than failure, isn’t it? You’ve got to be doubly strong and watchful and wary.

~ Noël Coward

All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. . . . These were leaders who saw strength in ordinary people and showed them how to break tyranny.

~ Noël Coward

Strange how potent cheap music is.

~ Noël Coward

An echo from the past when, innocentWe looked upon the present with delightAnd doubted not the future would be kinderAnd never knew the loneliness of night.

~ Noël Coward

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

~ Noël Coward

I don't know what London's coming to — the higher the buildings the lower the morals.

~ Noël Coward

The human race is a letdown, Ernest — a bad, bad letdown. And I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed, but it hasn’t. It thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime, but it hasn’t. It’s wallowing in it. It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and to our eyes and to our souls. We’ve invented a few things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet. Endless, peaceful quiet. Something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions.

~ Noël Coward

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

~ Noël Coward

Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade.

~ Noël Coward

As one gets older one discovers everything is going to be exactly the same with different hats on.

~ Noël Coward

It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of but my own.

~ Noël Coward

If you must have motivation, think of your paycheck on Friday.

~ Noël Coward

Work is much more fun than fun.

~ Noël Coward

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.

~ Noël Coward

I have always paid income tax. I object only when it reaches a stage when I am threatened with having nothing left for my old age - which is due to start next Tuesday or Wednesday.

~ Noël Coward

Let's drink to the spirit of gallantry and courage that made a strange Heaven out of unbelievable Hell, and let's drink to the hope that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness and peace again.

~ Noël Coward