A cowardly pride and an arrogant sense of shame.

The cowardly fear of exposing one's lack of talent, and the terror that even after grinding effort, one's innate insufficiency might become all the more apparent.

Life is too long to do nothing, yet too short to accomplish something.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

-- Oscar Wilde

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

-- William Shakespeare

This world, I think of it as my own, like the full moon lacking nothing at all.

-- Murasaki Shikibu

There is a goal but no way; what we call the way is hesitation.

-- Franz Kafka

Man is a mystery. It must be unraveled.

-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Heaven destroys me — it is not a failure of warfare.

-- Xiang Yu