We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never g...
Vouchsafe, O Lord,21 to bless this workroom of Thy servants, declared the dedication of one scriptorium, that all which they write therein may be comprehended by their intelligence and realized in the...
Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all t...
The patricians urge [Coriolanus] to set aside his most deeply held convictions for the purpose of getting elected. They want him to lie and to pander and to play the demagogue. Once he is securely in...
If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?
If the original ink proved tenacious, it could still be possible to make out the traces of the texts that were written over: a unique fourth-century copy of Cicero’s On the Republic remained visible b...
I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life (5.3.57–58).
Violators of the edict were threatened with eternal damnation and a fine of 10 ducats.
To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as It is not as you say, there is a heavy penalty: an imposition of silence or fifty blows. The high walls that hedged about the m...
Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. (3.4.34–37)
It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.
Instead, he wrote, quoting Lucretius, there were multiple worlds, where the seeds of things, in their infinite numbers, would certainly combine to form other races of men, other creatures. Each of the...
Independence & self-reliance had no cultural purchase; indeed, they could scarcely be conceived, let alone prized...The best course was humbly to accept the identity to which destiny assigned you: the...
In the enraptured audiences that have flocked to the play for more than four hundred years, Juliet in effect gets her wish that after death, night should take Romeo and cut him out in little stars And...
In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strength and manner of life of the animals. In Genesis the clay human is created in the im...
IN DEPICTING THE aspiring tyrant’s strategy, Shakespeare carefully noted among the landed classes of his time the strong current of contempt for the masses and for democracy as a viable political poss...
Flaubert: Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.
One of his letters by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aureli...
Monks were strictly forbidden to change what they thought were mistakes in the texts they were copying.
He obliterated by the praiseworthy use he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.