Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: You are impatient and hard to please. If alone, you call it solitude: if in the company of men, you dub them conspirators and thieves, and find fault with your very parents, children, brothers and neighbours. Whereas when by yourself you should have called it Tranquillity and Freedom: and herein deemed yourself like unto the Gods. And when in the company of the many, you should not have called it a wearisome crowd and tumult, but an assembly and a tribunal; and thus accepted all with contentment. What then is the chastisement of those who accept it not? To be as they are. Is any discontented with being alone? let him be in solitude. Is any discontented with his parents? let him be a bad son, and lament. Is any discontented with his children? let him be a bad father.—"Throw him into prison!"—What prison?—Where he is already: for he is there against his will; and wherever a man is against his will, that to him is a prison. Thus Socrates was not in prison since he was there with his own consent. (31 & 32).
Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl-A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship
“It is a very hard undertaking to seek to please everybody.”
Maxim 675
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave
Attributed to Monroe in self-help books and on social media, this quotation is of unknown origin and date.
Misattributed
“Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand.”
#251
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)
“You have to imagine
a waiting that is not impatient
because it is timeless.”
Source: "The Echoes Return Slow" in The Echoes Return Slow (1988)
“You are lively and impatient because there is so much life inside you.”
Original: Sei vivace e impaziente perché c'è tanta vita dentro di te.
Source: prevale.net
3 (20 October 1917); as published in The Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954); also in Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (1954); variant translations use "cardinal sins" instead of "main human sins" and "laziness" instead of "indolence".
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Context: There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.
"Graphology" http://skepdic.com/graphol.html, The Skeptic's Dictionary
“Whoever converses much among the old books, will be something hard to please among the new.”
Miscellanea (1690), Part II, Essay "Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning".
