“You often ask me, Priscus, what sort of person I should be, if I were to become suddenly rich and powerful. Who can determine what would be his future conduct? Tell me, if you were to become a lion, what sort of a lion would you be?” — Martial

“Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.” — Francis Bacon

“A thing of duty is annoy forever.” — Oliver Herford

“It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.” — Aeschylus

“No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.” — Groucho Marx

“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?” — Jean Cocteau

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” — Gore Vidal

Yet more aphorisms from German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:

• “The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.”
• “A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.”
• “The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, ‘bread-bread-fame’ or ‘fame-fame-bread.'”
• “We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.”
• “Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was — nobody any longer wanted to be that.”
• “With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.”
• “We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.”
• “There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”
• “With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.”
• “Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.”
• “There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.”
• “There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.”
• “What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don’t deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don’t we just as often draw the wrong ones?”
• “When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?”

“We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.” — Seneca

“I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.” — Kurt Vonnegut

“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.” — Samuel Johnson

“Nothing more completely represents a nation than a public building.” — Benjamin Disraeli