“I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?”

“In the life of the individual when love awakens it is older than everything else, because when it exists it seems as if it has existed for a long time; it presupposes itself back into the distant past until all searching ends in the inexplicable origin.”

“Hope is passion for what is possible.”

“Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.”

“It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.”

“QUINCE Francis Flute, the bellows-mender. FLUTE Here, Peter Quince. QUINCE Flute, you must take Thisby on you. FLUTE What is Thisby? a wandering knight? QUINCE It is the lady that Pyramus must love. FLUTE Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming.”

“A comedian can only last till he either takes himself serious or his audience takes him serious.”

“The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well intended halfness; a non performance of that which is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, is comedy and it announces itself in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.”