“We praise loyalty, but it pays the price when it supports those whom Fortune crushes.”
Dat poenas laudata fides, cum sustinet inquit
quos fortuna premit.
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia
Book VIII, line 485 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 153
“We praise loyalty, but it pays the price when it supports those whom Fortune crushes.”
Dat poenas laudata fides, cum sustinet inquit
quos fortuna premit.
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia
Book VIII, line 485 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
“What occasion had you to praise me? praise is often hurtful to those on whom it is bestowed.”
Heloise (1101–1164) French nun, writer, scholar, and abbess
Letter IV : Heloise to Abelard
Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Context: What occasion had you to praise me? praise is often hurtful to those on whom it is bestowed. A secret vanity springs up in the heart, blinds us, and conceals from us wounds that are ill cured. A seducer flatters us, and at the same time, aims at our destruction. A sincere friend disguises nothing from us, and from passing a light hand over the wound, makes us feel it the more intensely, by applying remedies. Why do you not deal after this manner with me? Will you be esteemed a base dangerous flatterer; or, if you chance to see any thing commendable in me, have you no fear that vanity, which is so natural to all women, should quite efface it? but let us not judge of virtue by outward appearances, for then the reprobates as well as the elect may lay claim to it. An artful impostor may, by his address gain more admiration than the true zeal of a saint.
Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar
Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 32
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
Speech at the Coliseum, Raleigh, North Carolina" (17 September 1960) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=74076 <br class="br">1960
“Death isn't a tragedy to God, only to those left behind.”
Patricia Briggs book Night Broken
Source: Night Broken
Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War
Book VII, 7.75-[3]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VII