“With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.”
Pliny the Elder book Natural History
Book VII, sec. 5.
Naturalis Historia
Reflections
“With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.”
Pliny the Elder book Natural History
Book VII, sec. 5.
Naturalis Historia
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone
Context: It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune — that is to say, when they endeavor to persist in their own being — prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put it.
Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: All The Pretty Horses: All The Pretty Horses
Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) American philosopher
Source: Towards a Better Life (1966), p. 8
Doris Veillette (1935–2019) Quebec journalist
Chronicle "Interdit aux hommes" (Forbidden to men), by Doris Veillette-Hamel, Journal Le Nouvelliste, June 10, 1972, page 19.
Chronicle "Forbidden to men", 1972
Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) German canon regular
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 578.
James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician
The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)
Elio Toaff (1915–2015) Italian rabbi
"Pope Speaks in Rome Synagogue, in the First Such Visit on Record" http://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/14/international/europe/14POPE.html by E. J. Dionne Jr, The New York Times, 13 April 1986, retrieved 9 August 2010.