Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXXVII: On Taking One’s Own Life
“Progress is a possibility for the animal: it can be broken in, tamed and trained; but it is not a possibility for the fool, because the fool thinks he has nothing to learn. It is his place to dictate to others and put them right, and so it is impossible to reason with him. He will laugh you to scorn in saying that what he does not understand is not a meaningful proposition. 'Why don't I understand it, then?', he asks you, with marvellous impudence. To tell him it is because he is a fool would only be taken as an insult, so there is nothing you can say in reply. Everybody else sees it quite clearly, but he will never realize it.
Here then, at the outset, is a potent secret which is inaccessible to the majority of people; a secret which they will never guess and which it would be useless to tell them: the secret of their own stupidity.”
Book Two: The Royal Mystery or the Art of Subduing the Powers, Chapter XII: The Terrible Secret
The Great Secret: or Occultism Unveiled
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Eliphas Levi22
French writer 1810–1875Related quotes
“I can tell you that only a fool destroys useful things merely because he doesn’t like them.”
Avram Davidson book Masters of the Maze
Source: Masters of the Maze (1965), Chapter 8 (p. 108)
Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)
“He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer
Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)
Context: That so much time was wasted in this pain.
Ten thousand years ago he might have let off down
To not return again!
A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;
The laughter sets him free.
A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.
The Fool is me!
And with one final shake of laughter
Breaks his bonds.
The nails fall skittering to marble floors.
And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle
As Man steps down in amiable wisdom
To give himself what no one else can give:
His liberty.
James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) Scottish physicist
Part III Poems, "A Vision Of a Wrangler, of a University, of Pedantry, and of Philosophy. " (November 10, 1852)
The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (1882)
