“Money is never spent to so much advantage as when you have been cheated out of it; for at one stroke you have purchased prudence.” — Schopenhauer
Quotations
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“Foreign nations are a contemporaneous posterity.”
— “A forgotten American essayist,” quoted by Brander Matthews in his introduction to The Oxford Book of American Essays, 1914
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“Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to be, when our memory shall have perished. The world is a poor affair if it do not contain matter for investigation for the whole world in every age.” — Seneca
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“Philosophy is the art of asking questions that come naturally to children using methods that come naturally to lawyers.” — David Hills
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“It was the irony. It was the same irony that caused me to think, pause, and just inwardly chuckle, just momentarily, that, God, here are two guys further away from home … than two guys had ever been, but there are more people watching us than anybody else has ever watched two people before in history.” — Buzz Aldrin
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“The true delight is in the finding out, rather than in the knowing.” — Isaac Asimov
Worldly Wisdom
Proverbs from around the world:
Every fire is the same size when it starts. — Seneca, North America
Youth is intoxication without wine; old age, wine without intoxication. — Peru
We cannot love that which we do not know. — Guinea
Second thoughts are best. — Greek
Do not propose to a girl whose home you have not seen. — Yaunde
Silence never makes mistakes. — India
Adversity makes men, prosperity monsters. — France
The threshold is the tallest mountain. — Slovenia
Punishment is a cripple, but it arrives. — Spain
Not the mouse is the thief, but the hole in the wall. — Aramaic
Praise does a wise man good but a fool harm. — Italy
A man does not seek his luck; luck seeks its man. — Turkey
He is young enough who has health, and he is rich enough who has no debts. — Denmark
God gives the wine but not the bottle. — Germany
Money likes to be counted. — Russia
Experience is a comb which nature gives us when we are bald. — China
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“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” — Mary Wollstonecraft
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“It is always observable that silence propagates itself, and that the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find any thing to say.” — Samuel Johnson
Insights
Maxims of La Rochefoucauld:
- “Jealousy is in some sort rational and just; since it only aims at the Preservation of a Good which belongs, or which we think belongs, to us: Whereas Envy is a Frenzy that cannot bear the Good of others.”
- “Good Sense should be the Test of all Rules, both ancient and modern; whatever is incompatible therewith is false.”
- “Avarice is more opposite to Economy than Liberality.”
- “We ought to be able to answer for our Fortune, to be able to answer for what we shall do.”
- “The most violent Passions have their Intermissions; Vanity only gives us no Respite.”
- “‘Tis more difficult to conceal the Sensations we have, than to feign those we have not.”
- “We should have but little Pleasure were we never to flatter ourselves.”
- “We love much better those, who endeavour to imitate us, than those who strive to equal us. For Imitation is a Sign of Esteem, but Competition of Envy.”
- “Whatever Difference may appear in Men’s Fortunes, there is nevertheless a certain Compensation of Good and Ill that makes all equal.”
And “The common Foible of old People who have been handsome, is to forget that they are no longer so.”