“Most of us find it starkly ludicrous that the height of all possible ambition, to the ungifted, must be to drape oneself in crowns and robes.”

Statement of 1937 or earlier, as quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) edited by Herbert Victor Prochnow
Context: Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world — making the most of one's best.

Savitri (1918-1950), Book Two : The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds
Context: A memory steals in from lost heavens of Truth,
A wide release comes near, a Glory calls,
A might looks out, an estranged felicity.
In glamorous passages of half-veiled light
Wandering, a brilliant shadow of itself,
This quick uncertain leader of blind gods,
This tender of small lamps, this minister serf
Hired by a mind and body for earth-use
Forgets its work mid crude realities;
It recovers its renounced imperial right,
It wears once more a purple robe of thought
And knows itself the Ideal's seer and king,
Communicant and prophet of the Unborn,
Heir to delight and immortality.
All things are real that here are only dreams,
In our unknown depths sleeps their reserve of truth,
On our unreached heights they reign and come to us
In thought and muse trailing their robes of light.

De toutes les choses sérieuses, le mariage étant la plus bouffonne.
Act I, scene ix
The Marriage of Figaro (1778)

Pilgrim’s Way (1940)
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Fiction, The Eve of St. Venus (1964)

in Lives of the Literature, edited by William Breit and ‎Barry T. Hirsch
1970s-1980s

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, P. 66.

Statement of 1937 or earlier, as quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) edited by Herbert Victor Prochnow