“Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

“Let me be dressed as I will, yet flies worms and flowers exceed me still.”

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

“Now is the winter of our discontent.”

“Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the way of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired.”

“What is more miserable than discontent?”

“My endeavorsHave ever come too short of my desires.Yet filed with my abilities.”

“I have thrust myself into this maze,Haply to wive and thrive as best I may.”

“Ambition's debt is paid.”

“What, no more ceremony? See, my women! Against the blown rose may they stop their nose That kneel'd unto the buds.”

“Much rain wears the marble.”

“When great leaves fall, the winter is at hand.”

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first.”

“But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, Leaving no tract behind.”

“The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.”

“What's the news?None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest,Then is doomsday near.”

“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”

“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.”