Source: The World We Want (2000), Chapter 3, Virtues And Vices, p. 77.
“A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough.”
As quoted in The Martians of Science : Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century (2006) by István Hargittai, p. 251
Context: I believe in excellence. It is a basic need of every human soul. All of us can be excellent, because, fortunately, we are exceedingly diverse in our ambitions and talents.
“Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us.”
"On True Happiness", Pennsylvania Gazette (20 November 1735).
1730s
Toast in The Callahan Chronicals (1996) [originally published as Callahan and Company (1988)], Part IV : Earth … and Beyond, "Post Toast", p. 392
“All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.”
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
As quoted in Day's Collacon : An Encyclopaedia of Prose Quotations: (1884), p. 930; Actual quote: "That thro certain Humours or Passions, and from Temper merely, a Man may be completely miserable ; let his outward Circumstances be ever so fortunate." An inquiry concerning virtue, or merit, p. 52.
“Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.”
Book III, Ch. 8
This quote is a paraphrase of a lengthier statement, as follows: We ordinarily see, in the actions of the world, that Fortune, to shew us her power in all things, and who takes a pride in abating our presumption, seeing she could not make fools wise, has made them fortunate in emulation of virtue; and most favours those operations the web of which is most purely her own; whence it is that the simplest amongst us bring to pass great business, both public and private; and, as Seiramnes, the Persian, answered those who wondered that his affairs succeeded so ill, considering that his deliberations were so wise, ‘that he was sole master of his designs, but success was wholly in the power of fortune’; these may answer the same, but with a contrary turn.
From Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton (1877), Book the Third, Chapter VIII — Of The Art Of Conference. Note : this is the version found at Project Gutenberg.
Attributed
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 180.
“Thus love makes fools of all of us, big and little”
Source: The History of Pendennis (1848-1850), Ch. 4.
Book Three, Chapter XIX.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two
