Paul Eldridge quotes:

Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird.

History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes.

Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits.

To have lived long does not necessarily imply the gathering of much wisdom and experience. One who has pedaled twenty-five thousand miles on a stationary bicycle has not circled the globe. He or she has only garnered weariness.

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.

Reading the epitaphs, our only salvation lies in resurrecting the dead and burying the living.

There are those whose sole claim to profundity is the discovery of exceptions to the rules.

With the stones we cast at them, geniuses build new roads with them.

For having expressed an opinion, however far-fetched, we straightway become its slave, ready to die defending it, and even ready to believe it. And many continue to be martyrs to causes which have ceased to exist, their crowns rusting upon their heads as tin wreaths rust upon forgotten tombs.

Avarice is fear sheathed in gold.

Authors hide their big thefts by putting small ones between quotation marks.

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.

Having read the inscriptions upon the tombstones of the great and little cemeteries, Wang Peng advised the Emperor to kill all the living and resurrect the dead.

Many a necklace becomes a noose.

To judge a man's character by only one of its manifestations is like judging the sea by a jugful of its water.

A man is most accurately judged by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or to reciprocate.

It is not true that men prefer foolish women. Rather they prefer women who can simulate foolishness whenever necessary, which is the very core of intelligence.

Reason is the shepherd trying to corral life's vast flock of wild irrationalities.

We hew and saw and plane facts to make them dovetail with our prejudices, so that they become mere ornaments with which to parade our objectivity.

We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones.