November 20th, 2006 | Published in Friendship, Quotes, Relationships
Cicero says, truly, that “most people unreasonably … want such a friend as they are unable to be themselves, and expect from their friends what they do not themselves give.”
–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 63
October 20th, 2006 | Published in Life, Politics, Quotes, Relationships
[E]xtreme tolerance, when it comes apart, produces some of the harshest acts of vengeance; for the anger and fury, heaped up together, catching fire all of a sudden, explodes all its energy at the first attack.
–Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Some Verses of Virgil” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 88
October 13th, 2006 | Published in Quotes, Relationships
The fact that we see so few good marriages is a sign of its price and its value. If you form it well and take it rightly, there is no finer relationship in our society. We cannot do without it, and yet we go about debasing it. The result is what is observed about cages: the birds outside despair of getting in, and those inside are equally anxious to get out. Socrates, when asked which was preferable, to take or not to take a wife, said: “Whichever a man does, he will repent of it.”
–Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Some Verses of Virgil” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 69