The lion cares less about being king of the beasts than about finding his dinner.
Flattery and insults raise the same question: What do you want?
Mistrust makes life difficult. Trust makes it risky.
To be thoroughly modern, an aphorism should trail off vaguely rather than coming to a point.
The unhappy are prisoners of a single round of thought.
An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.