Self-Examination

Michitaka refers to a poem about a man who was always looking for qualities and charms where thay could not reasonably be expected:
     The straightest tree
     Grows many a crooked branch:
     Foolish it is to blow the hair
     And so uncover faults.
That is to say, since even the best objects and people in this world have imperfections, there is no point in expecting normal things or people to be ideal; rather we should leave well enough alone. In this particular case Yoshichika has expected too much from the unknown woman in the carriage: by demanding a good poem ('straightening the branches') he has spoiled everything ('broken the tree'). The way in which Michitaka changes the reference to the tree imagery, while retaining the central point of the original verse is typical of the technique of poetic quotation in Shonagon's time.
— The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, Ivan Morris (tran. & ed.), p. 287 FN #96.

The fool who fancies he is full of wisdom
     While he sits by his hearth at home,
Quickly finds when questioned by others
     That he knows nothing at all.
— The Elder Edda: A Selection, Paul Taylor & W.H. Auden (trs.), p. 41.

                     The Patient Trees
                            by Jean Rousselot

The patient trees which surrounded my childhood,
The willows twisted by the waves' shoulder,
The chalky meadows along the flaws of the ice walls,
They all fall soundlessly away, in the night, in the sea,
Like the nameless dead who await the resurrection.
It is all so far from me after so many adventures —
Sidelong glances, darkened windows!
Each evening remorse shrivels my wrinkled forehead.
Down with my errors! Down with my lost days!
Where am I going, cut like this out of heaven and earth,
With my heavy body and my marble hands?
— One Hundred Poems From the French, Kenneth Rexroth (ed. & tr.), p. 89.

....Philosophies and philosophers theorize about happiness and the meaning of life. Talking about happiness is like discussing a good meal. No matter how great it sounds, it's not very filling. But after eating a big steak, a man walks with a spring in his step and a gleam in his eye that tells all that needs to be said about a steak. Chanting Daimoku is like eating a steak. It's not just a theory; it is the key to happiness.
— Nichiren Daishonin, The Gosho Reference, p. 237.

Larry. (Sardonically):
....I've nothing left to give, and I want to be left alone, and I'll thank you to keep your life to yourself. I feel you're looking for some answer to something. I have no answer to give anyone, not even myself. Unless you can call what Heine wrote in his poem to morphine an answer. (He quotes a translation of the closing couplet sardonically)

     "Lo, sleep is good; better is death; in sooth,
     The best of all were never to be born."
— Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh, p. 32.


[Cf. (sardonically) Tiresias' speech in Sophocles; et alii.]