Life and Existence

Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. . . . But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

I forgot in Camelot

Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea.

Life may not exactly be pleasant, but at least it is not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband’s clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.

How long will the human race sweat under the superstition that, in order to be happy and useful and intelligent, it is necessary to believe in things? What nonsense indeed! Human progress consists, not in acquiring beliefs, but in getting rid of them.

The public . . . demands certainties. . . . But there are no certainties.

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

Suicide: a belated acquiescence in the opinion of one’s wife’s relatives.

Aye, toil as we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths.

Aye, toil as we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths.

By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks . . . strike, strike through the mask!

What though before us lies the open grave?

You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

What would have happened if she hadn’t lost the necklace? Who knows? Who knows? How strange life is, how full of changes! How little it takes to doom you or save you!

From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

[ Rufus T. Firefly, played by Groucho Marx, speaking :] Will you marry me? Did he leave you any money? Answer the second question first.

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

[ “Last words” :] Money can’t buy life.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming. . . . This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy—deep down.