From Churchill to Horace, from Virgil to Franklin and a whole lot more

EADEM MUTATA RESURGO

Though changed I shall arise the same

Epitaph on the tombstone of Jacob Bernoulli, the Swiss pioneer of fluid dynamics and spiral mathematics

GREEK AND ROMAN

Everything which happens either happens in such a way as you were formed by nature to bear it, or as you were not formed by nature to bear it. If, then, it happens in such a way as you were formed by nature to bear it, do not complain but bear it as you were formed by nature to do. But if it happens in such a way as you were not formed by nature to bear it, do not complain, for it will perish after it has consumed you.

Depart then, satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied.

The universe is transformation; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

I believe because it is impossible.
Tertullan

The way up is the way down.
Heracleitus

Nothing can harm a good man, either in life or after death.
Socrates

Stand a little less between me and the sun.
Diogenes when asked by Alexander if he lacked anything

Inopem me copia fecit  - Plenty makes me poor.
Ovid

All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.

Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano - Your prayer must be for a sound mind in a sound body.
Juvenal

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from wise men.
Marcus Cato

Iactea ilea est  -  The die is cast.
Julius Caesar

Over the wine dark sea.
Homer

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

Ira furor brevis est--Anger is a brief madness.
Horace

History is philosophy drawn from examples.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundus-- Endure and preserve yourselves for better things.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes - I fear the Greeks, even though they offer gifts.
Virgil

Where they make a  desert they call it peace.
Tacitus

Whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad.
Euripedes

Democracy passes into despotism.
Plato

BRITISH

The suspense is terrible, I hope it will last.

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal
Oscar Wilde

Fortune that favours fools.
Ben Jonson

You can't expect a boy to be depraved until he has been to a good school.
Saki (H.H. Munro)

So little done, so much to do.
Cecil Rhodes last words

I never apologise!

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
George Bernard Shaw

Damn the consequences.
Lord Milner

Let the boy win his spurs.
Edward 111 of England of the Black Prince at Crecy

First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
Dr Who

Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.
Sir James Dewar

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell

We are born into a world where alienation awaits us.
R D Laing

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognise we should control our own thoughts.
Charles Darwin

There's always something fishy about the French.
Noel Coward

Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
John Milton

Accursed be he that first invented war.
Christopher Marlowe

Visions of glory spare my aching sight. Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!
Thomas Gray

I must be cruel only to be kind.

Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
William Shakespeare

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning

Die, my dear Doctor, that's the last thing I shall do!
Viscount Palmerston's attributed last words

I know your cause is lost, but in the heart of all right causes is a cause that cannot lose.
Christopher Fry

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
Jane Austen

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion
Robert Louis Stevenson

Mad bad and dangerous to know.
Lady Caroline Lamb on Byron

To whom nothing is given, of him can nothing be required.
Henry Fielding

Give us the tools and we will finish the job.
Winston Churchill

Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero….. Must drink brandy.
Jonson

When we build, let us think that we build forever.
John Ruskin

I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but, by God, they terrify me.
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

AMERICAN

What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the soul to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveller may never reach the end of it.
Ursula K. LeGuin

Life is just one damned thing after another.
Elbert Hubbard

The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately.

These are the times that try men's souls.
Thomas Paine

Taxation without representation is tyranny.
James Otis

There's a sucker born every minute.
Phineas T. Barnum

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The lie in the soul is a true lie.
Benjamin Jowett

He that lives on hope will die fasting.

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

You may delay, but time will not.
Benjamin Franklin

Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
Sam Goldwyn

I've worked myself up from nothing to state of extreme poverty.

Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.
Groucho Marx

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
Patrick Henry

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by product.
Eleanor Roosevelt

O Freedom, what liberties are taken in thy name.
Daniel George

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
Henry Havelock Ellis

All the world is queer save thee and me and even thou art a little queer.
Robert Owen

All the news that's fit to print. (Motto of the New York Times).
Adolph Ochs

Yes that's the worst of living you get older every day.
Rev. P. F. How

Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Early to bed and early to rise makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

Well if I called the wrong number why did you answer the phone?
James Thurber

Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.

I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.
Joyce Kilmer

I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.
Albert Einstein

Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.
Cornelia Otis Skinner

We knew the world would not be the same.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Strength to Love, 1963

Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud the other the stars.
Frederick Langbridge

I'm not sure there is much reality........Isn't most of our lives an illusion?........everything in the past is memory, right?........and everything in the future is imagination. Those're both illusions - memories are unreliable and we just speculate about the future. The only thing that's completely real is this one instant of the present - and that's constantly changing from imagination to memory. So, see? Most of our life's illusory.
Jeffrey Deaver

OTHERS

It was my first glimpse of the honeycomb world, my first inkling that the past never truly dies but is strangely, beautifully alive in the present. There is an interconnectedness to all things, a link between what lies buried and what lives above, a capacity for mutability that allows a good act committed in the present to rectify an imbalance in times gone by. That, in the end, is the nature of justice: not to undo the past, but by acting futher down the line of time, to restore some measure of harmony, some possibility of equilibrium, so that lives may continue with their burden eased and the dead may find peace in a world beyond this one.
John Connolly

Poor Mexico, so far from God and so near to the United States.
Porfiro Diaz

All is lost save honour.
Francis 1, King of France

Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
Blaise Pascal

All generalisations are dangerous, even this one.
Alexandre Dumas fils

Because it was there. (On why he climbed Mt. Everest).
Sir Edmund Hillary

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire

If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France

Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.
Karl von Clausewitz

Pay no attention to what the critic say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic.
Jean Sibelius

A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.
Proverbs 15:13

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, possee comitatus etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or as a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these men are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others - as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers and office holders - serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and MEN, serve the state with their conciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
Henry David Thoreau

The Way is like an empty vessel that yet may be drawn from.
Lao-Tzu

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
C. G Jung

I drink for the thirst to come.
Francois Rabelais

From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step.
Napoleon Bonaparte after the retreat from Moscow

Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate - All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Dante Alighieri