“Genuine is the sorrow endured without anyone else knowing about it.”

However great the dish that holds the turbot, the turbot is still greater than the dish.

Work divided is in that manner shortened.

He truly sorrows who sorrows unseen.

My poems are naughty, but my life is pure.

To-morrow I will live, the fool does say; To-day itself’s too late, the wise lived yesterday.

Every epigram should resemble a bee; it should have sting, honey, and brevity.

It is to live twice when we can enjoy the recollections of our former life.

I am a shell-fish just come from being saturated with the waters of the Lucrine lake, near Baiae; but now I luxuriously thrust for noble pickle.

You should not fear, nor yet should you wish for your last day.

Our days pass by, and are scored against us.

In adversity it is easy to despise life; he is truly brave who can endure a wretched life.

Fortune gives too much to many, enough to none.

This I ask, is it not madness to kill thyself in order to escape death?

Life is not living, but living in health.

You ask what a nice girl will do? She won’t give an inch, but she won’t say no.

Birds of a feather will flock together.

How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed:.

We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war. A new era is upon us.

And even in terms of justice, law codes, the legal system. A person who does not know English in Africa is excluded from that system because he can only operate through acts of translation.

I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.

I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.

Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.

In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.