The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [214]
6. There is no little enemy.
7. Though your enemy be a mouse, watch him like a lion.
8. Your enemies make you wise.
9. Enmity is anger waiting for revenge.
10. No tears are shed when an enemy dies.
11. Better a good enemy than a bad friend.
Chapter 61: Envy
1. Envy and wrath shorten life.
2. Envy does not enter an empty house.
3. No one is made richer by envy.
4. Bad eyes never see good.
5. People have most what they envy most.
6. Nothing sharpens sight like envy.
7. The envious shall never lack woes.
8. It is better to be envied than pitied.
9. Envy takes no holidays.
10. I would rather my enemies envy me than I them.
11. The envious grow thin at others’ prosperity.
Chapter 62: Error
1. The errors of the learned are learned errors.
2. Error can be sincerely enough believed to count as truth.
3. Error can only be defended by error.
4. Error is a hardy plant that flourishes in any soil.
5. Error, like straws, floats on the surface; the pearls lie deep below.
6. Honest error is to be pitied, not ridiculed.
7. No one prospers so suddenly as by other people’s errors.
8. One error breeds twenty more.
9. Love truth, but pardon error.
10. The wisest may err.
Chapter 63: Evil
1. Bad people leave their mark wherever they go.
2. Putrid flesh is all of a flavour.
3. A bad tree does not yield good apples.
4. A bad reaper never has a good sickle.
5. Bad is the wool that cannot be dyed.
6. Evil conduct is the root of misery.
7. Better good afar than evil at hand.
8. Evil is quickly learned.
9. Evil is wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart.
10. Evil deserves the evil it gets.
11. Humanity creates the evil it endures.
12. None but the base delight in baseness.
13. Of one ill come many.
14. Evil often triumphs but never conquers.
15. Doing evil to avoid evil is still evil.
16. The worse the evil, the calmer we face it.
17. No time is too brief for the wicked to work evil in.
18. The authors of great evils know best how to remove them.
19. An evil life is a kind of death.
Chapter 64: Experience
1. They know the water best who have waded through it.
2. An ounce of wit bought is better than a pound of wit taught.
3. Experience is good if not bought too dear.
4. Experience is the mother of knowledge, the father of wisdom.
5. Experience keeps an expensive school, but fools will learn in no other.
6. They are wrong to blame the sea who have twice survived shipwreck.
7. They are wise who learn from others’ woes.
8. They come home wisest who come home whipped by their own follies.
9. Put an old cat to an old rat.
10. Sad experience leaves no room for doubt.
11. The wise learn from others’ harm, the fool from his own.
12. I know by my own pot how others boil.
13. One bitten by a serpent is afraid of ropes.
14. A frog in a well knows nothing of the sea.
15. Who suffers, remembers.
Chapter 65: Failure
1. Failure teaches success.
2. Have the heart to fight and lose.
3. Failure is not in the lexicon of youth.
4. To fail in an immense ambition is to know the fiercest despair.
5. They who do not fly high will fall less far.
6. Not every fall is a failure.
7. Hasty climbers have sudden falls.
8. They fail badly who cannot rise again.
9. It is easier to fail than to succeed; easiest not to try at all.
10. When a tree is falling, all cry ‘Down with it!’
11. To dare is to brave the thought of failure.
12. Not everything that shakes falls.
Chapter 66: Fame
1. All fame is dangerous; good brings envy, bad brings shame.
2. Fame is a magnifying glass.
3. Fame is but the breath of the people.
4. Fame is proof that people are gullible.
5. Fondness of fame is avarice of air.
6. Fame is fickle and partial.
7. Fames comes unlooked for, if it comes at all.
8. Fame is as ephemeral as the famous.
Chapter 67: Fathers
1. It is not a father’s anger but his silence that a son dreads.
2. The father, in praising the son, praises himself.
3. He that loves the tree loves the branch.
4. No man is responsible for his