Life and Existence

Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.

The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.

I want . . . death to find me planting my cabbages.

I am myself the matter of my book.

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, and ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray.

Wilson Mizner . . . recalls his embarrassment when he first came into the world, and found a woman in bed with him.

[ On his deathbed, telling a priest he had no need to speak with him :] I’ve been talking to your boss, Father.

Human beings . . . they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It’s kind of boring, isn’t it?

Human beings . . . they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It’s kind of boring, isn’t it?

As he saw it, there was only one choice—to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!

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.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

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.