“No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”

— Epictetus

Book I, ch. 15.
Discourses

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I a…" by Epictetus?

Epictetus 175

philosopher from Ancient Greece 50–138

Related quotes

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch.7

“To you, all you have seems small: to me, all I have seems great. Your desire is insatiable, mine is satisfied. See children thrusting their hands into a narrow-necked jar, and striving to pull out the nuts and figs it contains: if they fill the hand, they cannot pull it out again, and then they fall to tears.—'Let go a few of them, and then you can draw out the rest!'—You, too, let your desire go! covet not many things, and you will obtain.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

95
Golden Sayings of Epictetus

“I call a fig a fig, a spade a spade.”

Menander (-342–-291 BC) Athenian playwright of New Comedy

Unidentified fragment 545 K (K = T. Kock, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta, 3 vols. (Leipzig 1880/8)), as translated in ‪Menander: The Principal Fragments‬‎ (1921) by Francis Greenleaf Allinson.

“Let the world slide, let the world go;
A fig for care, and a fig for woe!
If I can't pay, why I can owe,
And death makes equal the high and low.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Be Merry Friends; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“I think its a sickness to grieve too much for those who never cared a fig for you.”

Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove

Source: Lonesome Dove

“Diogenes compared them to fig-trees growing over precipices; for their fruit was devoured by daws and crows, not by men.”

Galén (129–216) Roman physician, surgeon and philosopher

Galen, on Diogenes's views on the ignorant rich, in Exhortation to Study the Arts, Wakefield (1796), p. 217; cf. Stobaeus, iv. 31b. 48.
Latter day attributions

“… My friend, there are some things that I cannot tell you. Some I will tell you in time; some, others will tell you; some you may never know, or you may be the first to find the answers.”

Robin McKinley book The Blue Sword

Source: The Blue Sword

“If you love me, be patient. Look at the trees. Are they in a hurry to ripen their fruit?”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Last Temptation of Christ

The Last Temptation of Christ (1951)

“Let me tell you something. They say he lied to Congress. I can think of no better bunch of people to lie to than Congress.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

The Rush Limbaugh Show
1994-06-06
Television, quoted in [The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, New Press, 1995-05-01, 105, 156584260X, 31782620]
on Oliver North

“Let him not boast who puts his armor on
As he who puts it off, the battle done.
Study yourselves; and most of all note well
Wherein kind Nature meant you to excel.
Not every blossom ripens into fruit.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

St. 11.
Morituri Salutamus http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19229 (1875)

“No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Epictetus 175

Related quotes

Related topics