Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV, 8
Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
“He is no better and no worse,
but he is free of Lethe's curse:
his warm hand makes a human pledge.”
Poem without a Hero (1963)
Context: All the mirrors on the wall
show a man not yet appeared
who could not enter this white hall.
He is no better and no worse,
but he is free of Lethe's curse:
his warm hand makes a human pledge.
Strayed from the future, can it be
that he will really come to me,
turning left from the bridge?
Letter to Edmund Burke (24 January 1779), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 41.
1770s
“5272. Travel makes a wise Man better, but a Fool worse.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 608.
“No man's more fortunate than he who's poor,
Since for the worse his fortune cannot change.”
Fragment 23
Fabulae Incertae
“Don't make it worse by thinking it's more painful than it actually is.”
Source: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book X, 33
“A solicitor is a man who does worse things within the law than most crooks do outside it.”
Source: The Way of Shadows (2008), Chapter 13 (p. 99)
“Commonplace life has shipwrecks worse than in Shakespearean dramas.”
Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts
Context: She goes into her room and disappears. Before I went to the war we slept in the same bed. We used to lie down side by side, so as to be annihilated in unconsciousness, or to go and dream somewhere else. Commonplace life has shipwrecks worse than in Shakespearean dramas. For man and wife — to sleep, to die.) But since I came back we separate ourselves with a wall.
