Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.

One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.

My mistress has come home; at last I've seen her. Now I'm ready to die.

What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?

If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.

I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.

[In] death at least there would be one profit; it would no longer be necessary to eat, to drink, to pay taxes, or to [offend] others; and as a man lies in his grave not one year, but hundreds and thousands of years, the profit was enormous. The life of man was, in short, a loss, and only his death a profit.