Lucrece Quotes & Sayings

Think of your child, then, not as dead, but as living; not as a flower that has withered, but as one that is transplanted, and touched by a Divine hand, is blooming in richer colors and sweeter shades than those of earth. — Richard Hooker

The difference between magic and meditation methods is the difference between drugs and diet - medicines will do swiftly what diet can only effect slowly, and in critical cases there is no time to wait for the slow processes of dietetics, so it must be either medicines or nothing. Nevertheless, drugs are no substitute for right diet and wholesome regime, and although magic enables a speedy and potent result to be attained, is is only by means of right understanding and right ethics that the position which has been won can be held. — Dion Fortune

Graduation, the hush-hush magic time of frills and gifts and congratulations and diplomas, was finished for me before my name was called. The accomplishment was nothing. The meticulous maps, drawn in three colors of ink, learning and spelling decasyllabic words, memorizing the whole of The Rape of Lucrece - it was for nothing. Donleavy had exposed us.
We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous. — Maya Angelou

Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece, where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus, but the ill-lit world of Livy's Rome darkens Lucrece. The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro. — Peter Porter

A dwarf who can't get the hang of metal? That must be pretty unique."
"Pretty rare, sir. But I was quite good at alchemy.."
"Guild member?"
"Not any more, sir."
"Oh? How did you leave the guild?"
"Through the roof, sir. But I'm pretty certain I know what I did wrong. — Terry Pratchett

There were stories in sweat.

The sweat of a woman bend double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren't on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing...
Sweat was a body's history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person had ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The fear, too, is a fear of yourself: a completely dualistic and contradictory fear. On the one hand, it is the fear that you do not have what it takes to make it, and on the other hand, a possibly greater fear that you do have what it takes, and that by definition you therefore also have a responsibility to do something really big. — Marya Hornbacher

For many, hectic activity provides a kind of perpetual adrenalin rush. Often those consumed by busyness feel as though this pattern of life and work legitimizes them. They feel important; they feel needed; they feel alive. However, they have a false sense of life and importance, and eventually it leaves them feeling hollow.
It — Gordon T. Smith

Time's glory is to calm contending kings To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light To stamp the seal of time in aged things To wake the morn and sentinel the night To wrong the wronger till he render right To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours And smear with dust their glittering golden towers - Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece — Ken Follett

The orator acknowledg'd the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavored to excuse the rum by saying, "The Great Spirit, who made all things, made every thing for some use, and whatever use he design'd any thing for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said 'Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with,' and it must be so." And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast. — Benjamin Franklin

A visitor to a garden sees the successes, usually. The gardener remembers mistakes and losses, some for a long time, and imagines the garden in a year, and in an unimaginable future. — W.S. Merwin