Antoninus

“But as he stood watching Carthage burn, Scipio reflected on the fate of this once great power. Overcome with emotion, he cried. His friend and mentor Polybius approached and asked why Scipio was crying.

"A glorious moment, Polybiius; but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my own country." Scipio then quoted a line from Homer: "A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people shall be slain."

Scipio knew that no power endures indefinitely, that all empires must fall.”
― Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“I think that Fortune watcheth o'er our lives, surer than we. But well said: he who strives will find his gods strive for him equally.”
― Euripides, Iphigeneia in Tauris

“276.—Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as the wind will blow out a candle, and blow in a fire.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims