Nor love thy Life, nor hate; but what thou livst
Live well, how long or short permit to Heav'n.

John Milton, Paradise Lost

In the end is it not futile to try and follow the course of a quarrel between husband and wife? Such a conversation is sure to meander more than any other. It draws in tributary arguments and grievances from years before – all quite incomprehensible to any but the two people they concern most nearly. Neither party is ever proved right or wrong in such a case, or, if they are, what does it signify? 

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

 

The Seven Virtues

Charity, Faith, and Hope.  Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.

Dante, The Divine Comedy

Oh ignorant, self-seeking cupidity which spurs us so in the short mortal life and steeps us so through all eternity!

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.

Carl Sagan

Wisdom for our time

Quando omni flunkus moritati.

As related by Red Green of Possum Lodge 

Did you ever know a rich person that didn't want to be more rich?

Said to Angelina

The better you know someone the less understandable they become. That's what intimacy is not a threshold of knowledge but a capitulation to ignorance, an acceptance that another person is made as bewildered and ungovernable by her life as you are by yours.

Anthony Marra, Mercury Pictures Presents

Never miss a good chance to shut up. 

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

If you’re riding’ ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it’s still there.

 Will Rogers

It's in the struggle?

"Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul.... yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self‐complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty‐four hours I begin to hate the best of men"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

James Thurber

Truer words ....

There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.

Dead men don’t find things out. 

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

 

Rules

That’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break ’em.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

You cannot make Italians really progressive; they are too intelligent. Men who see the short cut to good living will never go by the new elaborate roads.

G.K. Chesterton, in the The Paradise of Thieves (A Father Brown mystery)

Wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

 

G.K. Chesterton, in the The Blue Cross  (A Father Brown mystery) as attributed to "Poe."

È sempre bene
Il sospettare un poco in questo mondo.

 

Mozart, Cosi fan tutte

Here in no alien place he sat....

P. D. James, The Private Patient

 

He took comfort in knowing that the world would carry on without him-and, in fact, already had.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life … that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

A man -- a viewing-point man -- while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who through possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man thinks of Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good. In an animal other than man we would replace the term "good" with "weak survival quotient" and the term "bad" with "strong survival quotient." Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness: Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.

 John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez