Variant: Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
“nothing says 'I love you' like reducing yourself to a smoldering pile of ashes”
Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
“A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you're in the same room.”
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book XI
in a letter to Nolde's friend, 1902; as quoted in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 36
1900 - 1920
Misattributed
Source: This quote, frequently attributed to Aquinas, is actually a paraphrase of a passage (itself an elaborate paraphrase of Augustine) by Ptolemy of Lucca in his continuation of an unfinished work by Aquinas. The passage from Ptolemy reads: "Thus, Augustine says that a whore acts in the world as the bilge in a ship or the sewer in a palace: 'Remove the sewer, and you will fill the palace with a stench.' Similarly, concerning the bilge, he says: 'Take away whores from the world, and you will fill it with sodomy.'" (Ptolemy of Lucca and Thomas Aquinas, On the Government of Rulers, trans. James M. Blythe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 4. 14. 6). What Augustine actually wrote (in De ordine, 2. 4. 12) was simply: "Remove prostitutes from human affairs and you will unsettle everything on account of lusts." Only Book 1 and the first four chapters of Book 2 of On the Government of Rulers (De Regimine Principum) are by Aquinas. The rest of the work was written by Ptolemy. (It even mentions the coronation of Albert I of Hapsburg, an event that occurred in 1298, twenty-four years after Aquinas's death.) The quote comes from Book 4, which was definitely not written by Aquinas.
“A soul without reflection, like a pile
Without inhabitant, to ruin runs.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night V, Line 596.
“Security is like Tetris: You're successes disappear but your failures pile up.”
Source: Keynote address, https://www.youtube.com/c/cebitau/videos CeBIT Australia, October 2019
