Category: Thought

Stilicidi casus lapidem cavat.

The steady drip of water causes stone to hollow and yield.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) (First Century BC), Book I, line 313 (tr. Stallings).

No man will get my help in robbery, and therefore no governor will take me on his staff.

Juvenal, Third Satire, line 46.

Circumretit enim vis atque iniuria quemque,
atque, unde exortast, at eum plerumque revertit.

Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) (First Century BC), Book V, lines 1152–1153 (tr. Rouse).

Non omnia possumus omnes.

We cannot all do everything.

Virgil, Eclogues (37 BC), Book VIII, line 63 (tr. Fairclough).

The progress of civilization necessitates the giving of greater and greater attention and intelligence to public affairs.

We have no right to expect that our rulers will be more wise, more virtuous, or more perfect than those of other nations have been. . . .

History shows how the human mind, which, at the dawn of civilisation, was a lyre of three chords, became in the progress of civilisation a lyre of seven chords. . . .

G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Third Series) Problem the First — The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method (1879), p. 157.

Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.

Ideas are forces: the existence of one determines our reception of others.

G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (Third Series) Problem the First — The Study of Psychology: Its Object, Scope, and Method (1879).

One thing is needful: to give style to one’s character — a great and rare art! He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weaknesses delight the eye.