
The establishing of a fact.
Pt. IV, ch. 4
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)
Attributed to St. Augustine in The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Greene/Repentance_Robert_Greene.pdf (1592) by Robert Greene.
Disputed
Variant: Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.
The establishing of a fact.
Pt. IV, ch. 4
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)
“The last business of Christ's life was the saving of a poor penitent thief.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 73.
“Set a thief to catch a thief.”
Epigram 43; translation by Robert Allason Furness, from Poems of Callimachus (1931), p. 103
Epigrams
“4106. Set a Thief to catch a Thief.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Speech on Religious Intolerance as presented at the Pittsburgh Opera House (14 October 1879).
Context: They say the religion of your fathers is good enough. Why should a father object to your inventing a better plow than he had? They say to me, do you know more than all the theologians dead? Being a perfectly modest man I say I think I do. Now we have come to the conclusion that every man has a right to think. Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man.
“A NICE THOUGHT
One was a book thief.
The other stole the sky.”
Variant: One was a book thief. The other stole the sky.
Source: The Book Thief
“4788. The Thief is sorry he is to be hanged, but not that he is a Thief.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord.”
Source: The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu