Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.

Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one's grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.

All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy - and that is as well, for one could not bear it - whose grief is that the principals never met.

True friends share everything, except the past before they met.

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.