Life and Existence

At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement.

Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it.

There are no second acts in American lives.

There are no second acts in American lives.

See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he, alone among creatures, has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I am the doubter and the doubt.

If the red slayer think he slays,

Webster was much possessed by death

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs.

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

Birth, and copulation, and death.