Yet, as the strongest bodies are those which can equally well support the extremes of heat and cold, so the noblest minds are those which prosperity does not render insolent and overbearing, nor ill fortune depress: and here Aemilius appears more nearly to approach absolute perfection, as, when in great misfortune and grief for his children, he showed the same dignity and firmness as after the greatest success.
PlutarchRelated topics
absolute approach children cold dignity firmness fortune great grief heat ill insolent misfortune nor perfection prosperity render success support well yetRelated quotes
The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it.
Rob Sheffield
When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permit us to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees us the greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.
Karl Marx
All things come to me in black and white like virtue and crime. Yes, black and white are the two elements which concern me. It is my fortune, or misfortune, that I can see neither all in black nor all in white... I cannot help realizing both, for only in the two, only in black and white, can I see God as a unity creating again and again a great and eternally changing terrestrial drama.
Max Beckmann
The Mutakallemim... apply the term non-existence only to absolute non-existence, and not to absence of properties. A property and the absence of that property are considered by them as two opposites, they treat, e. g., blindness and sight, death and life, in the same way as heat and cold. Therefore they say, without any qualification, non-existence does not require any agent, an agent is required when something is produced.
Maimonides
There various news I heard of love and strife,
Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life,
Of loss and gain, of famine and of store,
Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore,
Of prodigies, and portents seen in air,
Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair,
Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,
The fall of favourites, projects of the great,
Of aid mismanagements, taxations new:
All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.
Alexander Pope
