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‘Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it’.
it was then I first saw how the things we have known ever since we were weaned can look new and strange, like enemies.
“Today I shall meet cruel men, cowards and liars, the envious and the drunken. They will be like that because they do not know what is good from what is bad. This is an evil which has fallen upon them not upon me. They are to be pitied, not—”’
No herd of other beasts, gathered together, has so ugly a voice as Man.
To love, and to lose what we love, are equally things appointed for our nature.
The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.
‘Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can’t help?’
But I was wrong to weep and beg and try to force you by your love. Love is not a thing to be so used.’
The one sin the gods never forgive us is that of being born women.
Sometimes I wondered who or what sends us this senseless repetition of days and nights and seasons and years; is it not like hearing a stupid boy whistle the same tune over and over, till you wonder how he can bear it himself?
A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.
There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.
the death which is wisdom I supposed he meant the death of our passions and desires and vain opinions.
The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered.
Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you. I might—
