“The world’s a scene of changes.”

Happy insect! what can be In happiness compared to thee? Fed with nourishment divine, The dewy morning’s gentle wine!

Our yesterday’s to-morrow now is gone, And still a new to-morrow does come on. We by to-morrow draw out all our store, Till the exhausted well can yield no more.

Who lets slip fortune, her shall never find: Occasion once past by, is bald behind.

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

Of all ills that one endures, hope is a cheap and universal cure.

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, But an eternal Now does always last.

Curiosity does, no less than devotion, pilgrims make.

Why dost thou heap up wealth, which thou must quit, Or what is worse, be left by it? Why dost thou load thyself when thou ‘rt to fly, Oh, man! ordain’d to die?

Fill all the Glasses there; for why Should every Creature Drink but I? Why, Man of Morals, tell me why?

All this world’s noise appears to me a dull, ill-acted comedy!

Poets by Death are conquer’d but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.

Ah, yet, e’er I descend to th’ grave, May I a small House and a large Garden have. And a few Friends, and many Books both true

Books should, not Business, entertain the Light; And Sleep, as undisturb’d as Death, the Night.

It is a hard and nice subject for a man to speak of himself: it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader’s ear to hear anything of praise from him.

Till the whole stream, which stopped him, should be gone, That runs, and as it runs, for ever will run on.

Lukewarmness I account a sin, as great in love as in religion.

The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

I can read a four-page scene once and have it memorized. It’s a skill you learn in school: disposable cramming.

If you can’t move and talk to people that you see, it’s not really my scene.

Every actor has three versions of each scene – the one that you rehearse the night before, in your bedroom.

I try to make it look easy, but the behind-the-scenes stuff is the challenge.

Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes.

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.