Surely there can be nothing to distinguish us from the beasts, if we simply devote ourselves to greed and never turn our hearts to the Buddhist truth.
—Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness
What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
![](http://markchmiel.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Branagh-Goddard-Hamlet.webp)