“Honour is what no man can give you, and none can take away. Honour is a man's gift to himself.”

“As the sun is to the earth, so Honour is to a man. without it, he will not flourish. All else may fail you, but honour is the treasure no one can take from you, the shield no one can penetrate unless you let them. Honour is beautiful and clean. Honour is sacred.”

“honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set a leg? No: or a arm? No: or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that then? Air. A trim reckoning! - Who hath it? He that died o‘ Wednesday? Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I‘ll have none of it: honour is a mere scutcheon: - and so ends my catechism.”

“If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!”

“Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was…) and a future (there shall be…). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: “Defunctus adhuc loquitur” (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth.”

“When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God's mistakes?”

“Lack of success can be attributed to one of two things: You don't know what to do, or you know what to do and you're not doing it.”