
“560. All things are difficult, before they are easy.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 187.
“560. All things are difficult, before they are easy.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“All things that are easy to say have already been perfectly said.”
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
As quoted in Angels in the workplace: stories and inspirations for creating a new world of work (1999) by Melissa Giovagnoli
Attributed
Against the Galilaeans (c. 362)
Context: All of us, without being taught, have attained to a belief in some sort of divinity, though it is not easy for all men to know the precise truth about it, nor is it possible for those who do know it to tell it to all men. … Surely, besides this conception which is common to all men, there is another also. I mean that we are all by nature so closely dependent on the heavens and the gods that are visible therein, that even if any man conceives of another god besides these, he in every case assigns to him the heavens as his dwelling-place; not that he thereby separates him from the earth, but he so to speak establishes the King of the All in the heavens as in the most honourable place of all, and conceives of him as overseeing from there the affairs of this world. What need have I to summon Hellenes and Hebrews as witnesses of this? There exists no man who does not stretch out his hands towards the heavens when he prays; and whether he swears by one god or several, if he has any notion at all of the divine, he turns heavenward. And it was very natural that men should feel thus.
Source: Economic Heresies (1971), Chapter I, Stationary States, p. 14