Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
QuintilianRead
Fear of the future is worse than one's present fortune.
Interpretation
Worrying about what might happen in the future can be more detrimental than dealing with current challenges.
This quote by Quintilian emphasizes the idea that anxiety and fear regarding future uncertainties often create more distress than the realities we face in our current lives. It suggests that while the present may have its difficulties, allowing ourselves to be consumed by the fear of what lies ahead can lead to greater suffering and hinder our ability to cope with the present.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing life, one could use this quote to encourage people not to be held back by fear of future failures.
Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
As regards parents, I should like to see them as highly educated as possible, and I do not restrict this remark to fathers alone.
Whilst we deliberate how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it.
A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.
An evil-speaker differs from an evil-doer only in the want of opportunity.
It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.
We live under threat from painful emotions: anger, desire, pride, jealousy and so on. Therefore we should always be ready to counter these with the appropriate antidote. True practitioners may be recognized by their unfailing mindfulness.
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
The sage's Way is to act and not to contend.
From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one - absolutely no one - is above the law.
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.
Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.