The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.

Wine refreshes the stomach, sharpens the appetite, blunts care and sadness, and conduces to slumber.

Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.

The graceful tear that streams for others' Man is the weeping animal born to govern all the rest.

The feasant hens of Colchis, which have two ears as it were consisting of feathers, which they will set up and lay down as they list.

Amid the sufferings of life on earth, suicide is God's best gift to man.

Envy always implies conscious inferiority wherever it resides.