If the majority doesn't laugh at you, beware that you must be saying something wrong. When the majority thinks you are a fool, only then is there some possibility of you being a wise man.
O youth or young man, who fancy that you are neglected by the gods, know that if you become worse, you shall go to worse souls, or if better to the better... In every succession of life and death, you will do and suffer what like may fitly suffer at the hands of like. This is the justice of heaven.
Today, nobody sees, or wishes to see, that in our time the enslavement of the majority of men is based on money taxes, levied on land and otherwise, which are collected by government from the subjects.
For, rightly, every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and, whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring orrather terminating my own soul.
Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands.
Words are mighty, words are living:Serpents with their venomous stings,Or bright angels, crowding round us,With heaven's light upon their wings:Every word has its own spirit,True or false, that never dies;Every word man's lips have utteredEchoes in God's skies.
Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.