“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.”
Book I, ch. 15.
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Epictetus175
philosopher from Ancient Greece 50–138Related quotes
“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.
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).
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
“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)
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
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet
St. 11. <br class="br"> Morituri Salutamus http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19229 (1875)