“He who flatters a man is his enemy. he who tells him of his faults is his maker.”
Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 32, 10.
The Gathas
“He who flatters a man is his enemy. he who tells him of his faults is his maker.”
Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic
"How to Love God" (12 September 1954).
General sources
Context: When I say I am the Avatar, there are a few who feel happy, some who feel shocked, and many who hearing me claim this, would take me for a hypocrite, a fraud, a supreme egoist, or just mad. If I were to say every one of you is an Avatar, a few would be tickled, and many would consider it a blasphemy or a joke. The fact that God being One, Indivisible and equally in us all, we can be nought else but one, is too much for the duality-conscious mind to accept. Yet each of us is what the other is. I know I am the Avatar in every sense of the word, and that each one of you is an Avatar in one sense or the other.
It is an unalterable and universally recognized fact since time immemorial that God knows everything, God does everything, and that nothing happens but by the Will of God. Therefore it is God who makes me say I am the Avatar, and that each one of you is an Avatar. Again, it is He Who is tickled through some, and through others is shocked. It is God Who acts, and God Who reacts. It is He Who scoffs, and He Who responds. He is the Creator, the Producer, the Actor and the Audience in His own Divine Play.
John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century
Book III, Ode 29, lines 65–68.
Imitation of Horace (1685)
Evelyn Beatrice Hall book The Friends of Voltaire
Source: The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 1 : D'Alembert: The Thinker, p.28
Arnaut Daniel (1150–1210) Occitan troubadour
"O frate," disse, "chesti qu'io ti cerno
col ditto," e additò un spirto innanzi,
"fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno.
Versi d'amore e prose di romanzi
soverchiò tutti; e lascia dir li stolti
che quel di Lemosì credon ch'avanzi.
Dante Purgatorio, canto 26, line 115; translation by Laurence Binyon, in Dante's Purgatorio (1938) p. 309.
Criticism
Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian
Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), p. 574