It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured. – Tacitus, Annals, c. 105
The cobra will bite you whether you call it cobra or Mr. Cobra. – Indian Proverb
Permit me, sir, to give you one piece of advice. Be not so positive; especially with regard to things which are neither easy nor necessary to be determined. When I was young I was sure of everything. In a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before. At present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to man. – John Wesley, London Magazine, 1775
Do not let a flattering woman coax and wheedle you and deceive you; she is after your barn. – Hesiod, 8c B.C.
They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. – Carl W. Buehner, 1971
Money swore an oath that nobody who did not love it should ever have it. – Irish proverb
God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination. – Augustine of Hippo, “Commentary on Psalm 145”, c. 400
Nothing has more strength than dire necessity. – Euripides, Helen, 412 BC
What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly. – Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting, 1703
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1974
We are human beings, not creatures of infinite possibilities. Robertson Davies, Conversations with Robertson Davies, 1989
A fanatic is someone who looks at beauty and sees injustice. – Theodore Dalrymple, Midnight Maxims, 2021
Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares. – Daniel Dennett, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, 2005
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. – Feodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, 1864
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