“{of Theatres} There, while weeping for sorrows which are not, laughing at the light jest or the ludicrous misadventure, how little is remembered of the want which makes fear the only bond that binds the living to life!”

“Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.”

“His jest shall savour but a shallow wit, when thousands more weep than did laugh it.”

“I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep.”

“Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”

““All life is theatre,” he said. “We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves….” He laughed gently. “Some players would say that is the best kind of theatre there can be.””

“But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you'll just weep yourself to death.”

“At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.”

“Every bond is a bond to sorrow.”

“1800. Make not a Jest of another Man's Infirmity. Remember thy own.”