Xerxes > Xerxes's Quotes

“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
― Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth: Ben Franklin on Money and Success

“Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“If you give up your freedom for safety, you don't deserve either one.”
― Ben Franklin

“The purpose of money was to purchase one's freedom to pursue that which is useful and interesting.”
― Ben Franklin

“Any society that would give up essential liberty to obtain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
Ben Franklin”
― Ben Franklin

“You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.”
― Euripides

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]
1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus – Tragedies
4. Sophocles – Tragedies
5. Herodotus – Histories
6. Euripides – Tragedies
7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes – Comedies
10. Plato – Dialogues
11. Aristotle – Works
12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid – Elements
14. Archimedes – Works
15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections
16. Cicero – Works
17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil – Works
19. Horace – Works
20. Livy – History of Rome
21. Ovid – Works
22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy – Almagest
27. Lucian – Works
28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus – The Enneads
32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More – Utopia
44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays
48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton – Works
59. Molière – Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics
63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology
67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve – The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.”
― Euripides, The Phoenician Women

“I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”
― Euripides

“When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.”
― Euripides

“He is not a lover who does not love forever.”
― Euripides

“In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you've heard the other side.”
― Euripides, The Children of Herakles

“Do not mistake the rule of force
for true power. Men are not shaped by force.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“It's human; we all put self interest first.”
― Euripides, Medea

“He who believes needs no explanation.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“Mortal fate is hard. You'd best get used to it.”
― Euripides, Medea

“Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses his past and is dead for the future.”
― Euripides

“Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not, not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

“Soon all of you immortals
Will be as dead as we are!
Come on then, what are you waiting for?
Have you run out of thunderbolts?”
― Euripides, The Trojan Women

“For with slight efforts how should we obtain great results? It is foolish even to desire it.”
― Euripides

“She came into the world fierce and stubborn and then she learned to hate.”
― Euripides, Medea

“The wisest men follow their own direction
And listen to no prophet guiding them.
None but the fools believe in oracles,
Forsaking their own judgment.”
― Euripides, Greek Tragedy

“Gods often contradict
our fondest expectations.
What we anticipate
does not come to pass.
What we don't expect
some god finds a way to make it happen.
So with this story”
― Euripides, Medea

“There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its course; a quiet conscience.”
― Euripides, Hippolytus

“Better a humble heart, a lowly life. Untouched by greatness let me live - and live. Not too little, not too much: there safety lies.”
― Euripides, Medea

“That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.”
― Euripides, Trojan Women

“Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?”
― Euripides

“The fact is that there are people, good people who,
not because they want to
but all the same,
fall in love with the wrong thing.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides