Where you are is of no moment, but only what you are doing there. It is not the place that ennobles you, but you the place; and this only by doing that which is great and noble.—Petrarch.
I take sanctuary in an honest mediocrity.—Bruyère.
A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.—Chapin.
Plagiarism.—Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists—wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.—Heinrich Heine.
Pleasure.—Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.—Aristotle.
We have not an hour of life in which our pleasures relish not some pain, our sours some sweetness.—Massinger.
How many there are that take pleasure in toil: that can outrise the sun, outwatch the moon, and outrun the field's wild beasts! merely out of fancy and delectation, they can find out mirth in vociferation, music in the barking of dogs, and be content to be led about the earth, over hedges and through sloughs, by the windings and the shifts of poor affrighted vermin; yet, after all, come off, as Messalina, tired, and not satisfied with all that the brutes can do. But were a man enjoined to this that did not like it, how tedious and how punishable to him would it prove! since, in itself, it differs not from riding post.—Feltham.
Boys immature in knowledge pawn their experience to their present pleasure.—Shakespeare.
'Tis a wrong way to proportion other men's pleasures to ourselves. 'Tis like a child's using a little bird—"Oh, poor bird, thou shalt sleep with me"—so lays it in his bosom and stifles it with his hot breath. The bird had rather be in the cold air. And yet, too, 'tis the most pleasing flattery to like what other men like.—Selden.
There is no pleasure but that some pain is nearly allied to it.—Menander.