If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!

The impatient man is his own enemy; he slams the door on his own progress.

Please, not again what you studied, how long you spent at it, how many books you wrote, what people thought of you - but: what did you learn?

A king who feared wasps once decreed that they were abolished. As it happened, they did him no harm. But he was eventually stung to death by scorpions.

A real secret is something which only one person knows.

People who speak or act in an ordinary fashion are most likely to be those who have been the recipients of higher experiences. But because they do not rage around, wild-eyed, people think that they are very ordinary folk and therefore not aware of anything unknown to the general run of man.

The chicken had his wish, and was magically transformed into a fox. Then he found that he could not digest grain.