Search

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 41

Ce n'est pas un grand malheur d'obliger des ingrats, mais c'en est un insupportable d'être obligé à un malhonnête homme.
Variant translation: It is not a great misfortune to be of service to ingrates, but it is an intolerable one to be obliged to a dishonest man.
Maxim 317.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Stay
Resurrection (2014)

Between the Bridge and the River (2006)
Variant: Change is the nature of God’s mind, and resistance to it is the source of great pain.

No Cross, No Crown (1682)

Amphitryon, Act II, scene 2.
Amphitryon

Why I Am an Agnostic (1896)
Context: The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor.... It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain. Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed. It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge. Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God.

As quoted in Bruce Lee : Artist of Life (1999) edited by John R. Little, p. 192
Context: Forget about winning and losing; forget about pride and pain. Let your opponent graze your skin and you smash into his flesh; let him smash into your flesh and you fracture his bones; let him fracture your bones and you take his life. Do not be concerned with escaping safely — lay your life before him.

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book XII, Line 153 (tr. Fagles)

Comparing his dueling days with commando tactics, as quoted in Skorzeny (1972) by Charles Whiting, p. 17.
Context: My knowledge of pain, learned with the sabre, taught me not to be afraid. And just as in dueling when you must concentrate on your enemy's cheek, so, too, in war. You cannot waste time on feinting and sidestepping. You must decide on your target and go in.

Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 273
Context: No God created the crime of murder, and no God created sorrow or pain... Again, because you believe that you can murder a man and end his consciousness forever, then murder exists within your reality and must be dealt with... The assassin of Dr. King believes that he has blotted out a living consciousness for all eternity... But your errors and mistakes, luckily enough, are not real and do not affect reality, for Dr. King still lives.

Verses Written on a Window in Scotland.
Context: Tender-handed stroke a nettle,
And it stings you for your pains;
Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.’Tis the same with common natures:
Use ’em kindly, they rebel;
But be rough as nutmeg-graters,
And the rogues obey you well.

Book 9, Ch. 16
Variant translations:
Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.
The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.
The Histories

Smiley's People (1979)

El-Sisi addressing the Egyptians http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2013/10/07/egyptian-people-will-never-forget-who-stood-with-them-or-against-them-al-sisi
2013

Je ne trouve rien de si pénible que d'avoir à mener des hommes.
in his December 29 1816 letter to his uncle Léonor Mérimée, in [Œuvres complètes d'Augustin Fresnel, Imprimerie impériale, 1866, http://books.google.com/books?id=3QgAAAAAMAAJ, xviii]

Memoirs of J. Casanova de Seingalt (1894)

as remembered by William S. Burroughs, in: Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw. The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, p. 61.

Source: The Graveyard Game (2001), Chapter 7, “London, 2026” (p. 65)