“The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.”

Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.

The prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk – they are all part of the curriculum.

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.

I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.

It is an absolute and virtually divine perfection to know how to enjoy our being rightfully.

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them… Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one’s own inner self.

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.

No pleasure has any savor for me without communication.

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

It’s all about what they can get out of me.

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.

There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate – when a particular course of action just feels right.

It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.

At quite uncertain times and places, The atoms left their heavenly path, And by fortuitous embraces, Engendered all that being hath. And though they seem to cling together, And form ‘associations’ here, Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether, And through the depths of space career.

For ‘Conan,’ I had to eat boiled chicken breast and work out all the time and basically eat like a bird every two hours and stay ripped.