| 1. | Oh, William, what pitiable creatures we men are! When we go to church we make the devil angry, when we enjoy ourselves in the inns, we make God angry; we are the unlucky lot stuck between two fires! |
| 2. | How can you get giants out of a dwarf, my good chap? Can a thrush lay eagle’s egg? Can a dolphin give birth to a whale? |
| 3. | What we call debt is a hump on our backs; it is an awkward load that crushes one; and loads are carried only by stupid animals, by camels, mules, and donkeys; the back of an intelligent person is flat ! |
| 4. | London has now become almost like a gigantic frog! With its long tongue it draws curious insects from all over the world inside itself! |
| 5. | If a moneyed man had a “corny mind”, a flatterer would immediately start chasing him like a hungry hen! |
| 6. | A big city is a big ocean; the one who doesn’t know how to swim finds himself at its bottom! |
| 7. | Like a butcher without a knife, a knight without a sword, and a farrier without a hammer, you cannot have a town without rules; if there were a town like that, a great big anarchy would reign there, just as in the realm of animals! |
| 8. | I think this man is a bit crazy, but aren’t we all a little crazy anyway? |
| 9. | A man without money is like a windmill left without the wind, don’t you ever forget this! |
| 10. | We should extinguish not candles, but torches, my good neighbour; we should fell not shrubs but trees: we should kill one giant instead of ten dwarfs!.. When there is an ostentatious cock crowing all over the place, what is the use of killing one insignificant chick? In a war you have to kill the king first; thus you can put an end to the battle more quickly! |
| 11. | Between birth and death, neighbour, there is no business that is not risky; drinking water in a sitting position included! . . The gist of the matter is to do everything with fine tuning as an acrobat does when walking a tight rope, like a carpenter measuring everything meticulously! |
| 12. | A bird without wings and a man without art are both condemned to wander in low places; they can never soar up to those unrivaled heights. |
| 13. | We live in a crowded and stifling world, my dear sir; just to be able to walk, we have to push and shove others willy nilly! |
| 14. | If the quality of the people got better as they aged, how good that would be, don’t you think so? Then we would put all the swindlers, crooks, usurers, robbers, hucksters, and gamblers we could find into a barrel and wait for some years, until their characters could leave an exquisite taste on all palates. |
| 15. | Life and death; there is no bridge between the two; they are stuck to each other! Death is only a step away from us, no more, only one step! |
| 16. | An actor should have not one face but a thousand faces; like the phoenix which carries a print of each animal, an actor should carry a print of each human being! |
| 17. | The theatre is a machine of transformations: everything is transformed into another thing; a bald man has thick hair on his head; a man with strong legs gains a limp and a sharp-eyed person becomes blind; an actor who is an atheist immediately turns into the most pious priest on earth! |
| 18. | When chasing a hare, you must have more than one greyhounds about you; when one of them has failed, my dear neighbour, you call to the next “Get it!”! |