Life and Existence

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.

[ J. Cheever Loophole, played by Groucho Marx, speaking :] I bet your father spent the first year of your life throwing rocks at the stork.

[ 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.

And a rose, she lived as roses do, the space of a morn.

And nowhere, surely, should we discover more painful and absolute sacrifice. . . . The queen bids farewell to freedom, the light of day. . . . The workers give five or six years of their life, and shall never know love, or the joys of maternity.

Nothing is more difficult to transact, nor more dubious to succeed, nor more dangerous to manage, than to make oneself chief to introduce new orders. Because the introducer has for enemies all those whom the old orders benefit, and has for lukewarm defenders all those who might benefit by the new orders.

Nothing is accidental in the universe -- this is one of my Laws of Physics -- except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? ... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him alright.

I think a man's duty is to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove, and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life.

Time discovers truth.