It's much more stimulating to be marginal, to act without recognition, than to receive public thanks.

Even misfortune has its advantages say the wise. Of course the wise say stupid things, because even wisdom has its foolishness, say I.

This tent's open to the south and north, and the roads are broad and lead to green lands and black lands and there's plenty to do in the world - sift flour, hammer iron, beat rugs, plow furrows, gossip about the neighbors, cast fishing nets - but what there is to do here is listen.

And I'd add that every good thing has its disadvantages, and the disadvantage of love is precisely that it leaves room for nothing else, not even the prudence of ferrets.

Three days after that Emperor Ferret signed an insane decree: every man who wished to stay at court must be castrated. He was mad, no doubt of it; but the men who preferred mutilation to leaving the court were madder.

Maybe you have to be a bit touched to be a ruler, good or bad. For, as the wise say, a sensible man looks after his garden and a coward looks after his money; a just man cares about his city and a crazy man cares about the government; and a wise man studies the thickness of fern-fronds.

All these works of the imaginative inventions unfortunately got into chronicles, which were made into books which everybody respected and believed, principally because they were thick, hard to hold, tedious, and old.

He was a good emperor. I won't say he is perfect, because he wasn't; no, my friends, no man is perfect and an emperor less than anybody, because he holds power in his hands, and power is as dangerous as an animal not fully tamed, dangerous as acid, sweet and fatal as poisoned honey.