“The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.”
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer
No. 402
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)
“You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.”
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
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Cesare Pavese137
Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator 1908–1950Related quotes
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor
Auguste Rodin in letter to Camille Claudel, as cited in: Nigel Cawthorne (1998) Sex Lives of the Great Artists. p. 68
1950s-1990s
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi
Source: Discipleship (1937), Revenge, p. 142.
Context: By willing endurance we cause suffering to pass. Evil becomes a spent force when we put up no resistance. By refusing to pay back the enemy with his own coin, and preferring to suffer without resistance, the Christian exhibits the sinfulness of contumely and insult. Violence stands condemned by its failure to evoke counter-violence.
“Nothing will a man rue more than refusal to listen to the wise.”
Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher
54.
Every Good Man is Free
George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
Variant translation: I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left... Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942), The Garden of Forking Paths
“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor”
Alexis Carrel (1873–1944) French surgeon and biologist