Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIX: On Noble Aspirations
The Ladder of St. Augustine, st. 10.
Source: Good Poems for Hard Times
Seneca the Younger book Epistulae morales ad Lucilium
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XXXIX: On Noble Aspirations
“… he sang with his eyes squeezed tight, as if he were dropping from a great height.”
Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist
The Immortals (2009)
“The higher they climbed in their struggle to reach the top, the harder grew their toil. When one height had been mastered, a second opens and springs up before their aching sight.”
Quoque magis subiere iugo atque euadere nisi
erexere gradum, crescit labor. ardua supra
sese aperit fessis et nascitur altera moles.
Book III, line 528–530
Punica
Alexis (-372–-270 BC) Athenian poet of Middle Comedy
Mandragorizomene, Fragment 1, 14.
Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician
Why Do Little Girls?
Song lyrics, Living Room Suite (1978)
Yukio Mishima book Sun and Steel
Source: Sun and Steel (1968), p. 87.
Context: Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903) British politician
On an old Song. Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)
1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)