“Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.”

“Not with whom you are born, but with whom you are bred.”

“Those who will play with cats must expect to be scratched.”

“In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.”

“The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one.”

“They must take me for a fool, or even worse, a lunatic. And no wonder ,for I am so intensely conscious of my misfortune and my misery is so overwhelming that I am powerless to resist it and am being turned into stone, devoid of all knowledge or feeling.”

“It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.”