What water gives, water takes away.
—Portuguese proverb
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Quotes
I shall embrace my rival—until I suffocate him.
—Jean Racine, 1669Pride and excess bring disaster for man.
—Xunzi, 250 BCHistories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.
—Alexander Pope, 1709Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.
—Charles Lamb, 1810I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.
—Catherine the Great, c. 1796A shopkeeper will never get the more custom by beating his customers; and what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.
—Josiah Tucker, 1766Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.
—Epictetus, c. 100Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
—Pericles, c. 431 BCLike a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BCWhat man was ever content with one crime?
—Juvenal, c. 125The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972There is only one antidote to mental suffering and that is physical pain.
—Karl Marx, 1860