“It should not prejudice my voice that I’m not born a man, if I say something advantageous to the present situation. For I’m taxed too, and as a toll provide men for the nation.”

You cannot make a crab walk straight.

To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them.

When men drink wine they are rich, they are busy, they push lawsuits, they are happy, they are friends.

Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much!

A fox is subtlety itself.

There is no honest man! not one, that can resist the attraction of gold!

A man’s homeland is wherever he prospers.

Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a Centaur, a Part, or a Wolf, or a Bull?

It is bad taste for a poet to be coarse and hairy.

You vote yourselves salaries out of the public funds and care only for your own personal interests; hence the state limps along.

These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: can’t live with them, or without them!

Hunger knows no friend but its feeder.

The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here.

There is no beast, no rush of fire, like woman so untamed. She calmly goes her way where even panthers would be shamed.

By words the mind is winged.

Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod.

Everybody’s born to be different, that’s the one thing that makes us the same.

I was born in a place where your ZIP code determines your destiny.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

Self-creation never ends. You are continually creating yourself from the field of infinite possibilities. You are, in every moment, born again. And so is everyone else.

Certain, when I was born, so long ago, Death drew the tap of life and let it flow; And ever since the tap has done its task, And now there’s little but an empty cask.

Like the lotus flower that is born out of mud, we must honor the darkest parts of ourselves and the most painful of our life’s experiences, because they are what allow us to birth our most beautiful self.

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.

Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth.