The Way of Men (2012), The Bonobo Masturbation Society
“Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold, which the owner knows not of.”
Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)
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Jonathan Swift 141
Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet 1667–1745Related quotes

Book I, Canto III, II Love a Virtue.
The Angel In The House (1854)

As quoted in Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras by John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook (1999)
The Golden Verses
Context: You will know that wretched men are the cause of their own suffering, who neither see nor hear the good that is near them, and few are the ones who know how to secure release from their troubles. Such is the fate that harms their minds; like pebbles they are tossed about from one thing to another with cares unceasing. For the dread companion Strife harms them unawares, whom one must not walk behind, but withdraw from and flee.

“He knows his own strength; he knows that he was born to carry burdens.”
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXI: On the supreme good

“Men do not know how to appreciate or measure luck except that of others. Their own never.”
History of the Greeks, Rizzoli 1959.
1950s - 1990s

“Look round the habitable world: how few
Know their own good, or knowing it, pursue.”
Juvenal, Satire X (1693), lines 1–2.

“Thus must we toil in other men's extremes,
That know not how to remedy our own.”
Act III, sc. vi
The Spanish Tragedy (1592)