“Let each man pass his days in that wherein his skill is greatest.”
Qua pote quisque, in ea conterat arte diem.
Propertius (-47–-16 BC) Latin elegiac poet
II, i, 46.
Elegies
Source: Savonarola (1881), Girolamo Savonarola in Act I, sc. iv; p. 49.
“Let each man pass his days in that wherein his skill is greatest.”
Qua pote quisque, in ea conterat arte diem.
Propertius (-47–-16 BC) Latin elegiac poet
II, i, 46.
Elegies
“[ There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life, could he find it. ]”
George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest
Jacula Prudentum (1651)
“The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.”
William Makepeace Thackeray Vanity Fair
Vol. I, ch. 2.
Vanity Fair (1847–1848)
Context: The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.
Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician
Iraq? They just need to think it through (2007)
Context: What happened was, 2,400 years ago, the Greek Gang of Three, by whom I mean Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, started to think based on analysis, judgment and knowledge. At the same time, church people, who ran the schools and universities, wanted logic to prove the heretics wrong. As a result, design and perceptual thinking was never developed. People assumed philosophers were doing it and so they blocked anyone else from doing it. But philosophers were not. Philosophers may look out at the world from a stained-glass window, but after a while they stop looking at the world and start looking at the stained glass.
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.”
Jonathan Swift book The Battle of the Books
The Battle of the Books, preface (1704)
Muhammad al-Taqi (811–835) ninth of the Twelve Imams of Twelver Shi'ism
[Baqir Sharīf al-Qurashi, The life of Imam Muhammad al-Jawad, Wonderful Maxims and Arts, 2005]
John Berger (1926–2017) British painter, writer and art critic
Source: About Looking (1980), Chapter "Why Look at Animals?"