Epp. Apoll. 35
Letters
From interview with Komal Nahta
“Chremylus: [Wealth], the most excellent of all the gods.”
tr. O'Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Pl.+230
Plutus, line 230
Plutus (388 BC)
“I was on the way to my hotel, and I passed a hotel going in the opposite direction.”
He arrived in Saigon on the day that Vietcong agents blew up an American officers' billet.
New York Times obituary, July 28, 2003 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/obituaries/28CND-HOPE.html?pagewanted=1
“The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.”
Source: Red Mars (1992), Chapter 2, “The Voyage Out” (p. 67)
“Even to a wicked man a divinity gives wealth, Cyrus, but to few men comes the gift of excellence.”
Source: Elegies, Line 149-150
Letter VII
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Oh! what a frightful business is this modern society; the race for wealth — wealth. I am ashamed to write the word. Wealth means well-being, weal, the opposite of woe. And is that money? or can money buy it? We boast much of the purity of our faith, of the sins of idolatry among the Romanists, and we send missionaries to the poor unenlightened heathens, to bring them out of their darkness into our light, our glorious light; but oh! if you may measure the fearfulness of an idol by the blood which stains its sacrifice, by the multitude of its victims, where in all the world, in the fetish of the poor negro, in the hideous car of Indian Juggernaut, can you find a monster whose worship is polluted by such enormity as this English one of money!
Variant: I wished I was on the same bus as her. A pain stabbed my heart as it did everytime I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.
Source: On the Road
Sādhanā : The Realisation of Life http://www.spiritualbee.com/spiritual-book-by-tagore/ (1916)
Context: That side of our existence whose direction is towards the infinite seeks not wealth, but freedom and joy. There the reign of necessity ceases, and there our function is not to get but to be. To be what? To be one with Brahma. For the region of the infinite is the region of unity. Therefore the Upanishads say: If man apprehends God he becomes true. Here it is becoming, it is not having more. Words do no gather bulk when you know their meaning; they become true by being one with the idea.
