Laudator Temporis Acti

Euripides, Suppliant Women 612 (tr. David Kovacs):

Yet I see that the gods' ways are different from those of mortals.

διάφορα πολλὰ θεῶν βροτοῖσιν εἰσορῶ.

Cf. Isaiah 55:8 (KJV):

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.

Panchatantra, introduction, tr. Dermot Killingley, Beginning Sanskrit, Vol. I (Newcastle upon Tyne: Grevatt & Grevatt, n.d.), p. x:

Book-learning is endless, life is short, and obstacles are many. We should keep to what is essential, like swans extracting milk from water.

The same, tr. Arthur W. Ryder:

Since verbal science has no final end,
Since life is short, and obstacles impend,
Let central facts be picked and firmly fixed,
As swans extract the milk with water mixed.

The same, tr. Chandra Rajan:

Your Majesty, it is true that life is short, and it is beset by many obstacles. Knowledge knows no bounds, and it takes years to acquire it. Therefore, it is held that the essentials of knowledge have to be extracted and grasped, just as the noble bird, the swan, extracts the milk from the water it is mixed in.

C.S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves (February, 1932; on Froissart):

To enjoy a book like that thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder—considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrap-books—why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chapter 12, § 155 (tr. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway):

In early youth we sit in front of our impending course of life like children at the theatre, in cheerful and tense expectation of the things to come. How fortunate that we do not know what is actually to come. For to anyone who knows, children at times would seem like innocent delinquents who are not condemned to death, to be sure, but to life, and have not yet heard the terms of their sentence. — Nevertheless everyone wishes himself an old age, thus a state of which it can be said: 'Today it is bad and it will get worse every day — until the worst arrives.'

In früher Jugend sitzen wir vor unserm bevorstehenden Lebenslauf, wie die Kinder vor dem Theatervorhang, in froher und gespannter Erwartung der Dinge, die da kommen sollen. Ein Glück, daß wir nicht wissen, was wirklich kommen wird. Denn wer es weiß, dem können zu Zeiten die Kinder vorkommen wie unschuldige Delinquenten, die zwar nicht zum Tode, hingegen zum Leben verurtheilt sind, jedoch den Inhalt ihres Urtheils noch nicht vernommen haben. — Nichtsdestoweniger wünscht Jeder sich ein hohes Alter, also einen Zustand, darin es heißt: „es ist heute schlecht und wird nun täglich schlechter werden, — bis das Schlimmste kommt.”

John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), Memories and Milestones (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1915), p. 118:

Caesar's Commentaries is the dullest book in Latin. It is like making a road to read it. It is not a book; it is a stone-crushing machine. The teacher, a two-dollar-a-day man, stands beside the machine and runs it. And this is the Classics.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for drawing my attention to a more sympathetic perspective in Christopher B. Krebs, "A Style of Choice," chapter 8 of Luca Grillo and Christopher B. Krebs (edd.), The Cambridge Companion to the Writings of Julius Caesar (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017) pp. 110-129 (at 129, footnotes omitted):

Whatever its specific immediate effect, Caesar's neat, formulaic, and seductively simple Latinity surely contributed to his elevation to classic status (obtained in the Renaissance, not since relinquished). But, just as surely, it alone cannot account for the fascination engendered in intellectuals as diverse in interests, epochs, and cultures as Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Johann Gottfried Herder. At least as important was a simplicity of a different (and more troubling) kind, effected by his rhetoric of stringency: it transforms disorderly realities on far-flung western-European grounds and largest-scale sanguinary mayhem inflicted and suffered by the hundreds of thousands into seemingly rational and ineluctable moves in a game of wits on the board of Gallia omnis. In so removing the war from the contingencies of the “there and then,” it elevates it to a timeless tale of superior power, as told in the third person by an Olympian observer by the name of Caesar, whose formulaic narrative, in plot as well as language, generates a beguiling sense of familiarity. And, to turn to the final aspect of Caesar’s classic, the rational swiftness of the writing appears but a mirror of the forceful swiftness of the warring: Caesar’s narrative "march[es] along, orderly as a legion." [F. E. Adcock Caesar as Man of Letters 1956:71]. The same mind, it seems, imposes order on the fields of battle and the accounts of battle; its style is its image.

Related post: Incurably Tedious Authors.

Euripides, Suppliant Women 748-749 (tr. Edward P. Coleridge):

Ye cities likewise, though ye might by parley end your mischief,
yet ye choose the sword instead of reason to settle all disputes.

πόλεις τ᾿, ἔχουσαι διὰ λόγου κάμψαι κακά,
φόνῳ καθαιρεῖσθ᾿, οὐ λόγῳ, τὰ πράγματα.

Christopher Collard ad loc.:

Christopher Morley (1890-1957), Parnassus on Wheels (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, 1917), p. 7:

Hot bread and coffee, eggs and preserves for breakfast; soup and hot meat, vegetables, dumplings, gravy, brown bread and white, huckleberry pudding, chocolate cake and buttermilk for dinner; muffins, tea, sausage rolls, blackberries and cream, and doughnuts for supper—that's the kind of menu I had been preparing three times a day for years.

Euripides, fragment 1076 Kannicht (tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp):

Best of all not to force the gods,
but to be content with one's lot. Desire for the impossible
makes many lose what they have now.

πάντων ἄριστον μὴ βιάζεσθαι θεούς,
στέγειν δὲ μοῖραν· τῶν ἀμηχάνων δ᾿ ἔρως
πολλοὺς ἔθηκε τοῦ παρόντος ἀμπλακεῖν.

Plato, Laws 5.747b (tr. Trevor J. Saunders):

For domestic and public purposes, and all professional skills, no single branch of a child's education has such an enormous range of applications as mathematics; but its greatest advantage is that it wakes up the sleepy ignoramus and makes him quick to understand, retentive and sharp-witted; and thanks to this miraculous science he does better than his natural abilities would have allowed.

πρός τε γὰρ οἰκονομίαν καὶ πρὸς πολιτείαν καὶ πρὸς τὰς τέχνας πάσας ἓν οὐδὲν οὕτω δύναμιν ἔχει παίδειον μάθημα μεγάλην, ὡς ἡ περὶ τοὺς ἀριθμοὺς διατριβή· τὸ δὲ μέγιστον, ὅτι τὸν νυστάζοντα καὶ ἀμαθῆ φύσει ἐγείρει καὶ εὐμαθῆ καὶ μνήμονα καὶ ἀγχίνουν ἀπεργάζεται, παρὰ τὴν αὑτοῦ φύσιν ἐπιδιδόντα θείᾳ τέχνῃ.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chapter 11, § 147 (tr. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway):

What a difference there is indeed between our beginning and our end! The former in the delirium of craving and the rapture of lust, the latter in the destruction of all organs and the musty odour of corpses. The path between these two also goes steadily downhill with respect to well-being and enjoying life. Blissfully dreaming childhood, cheerful youth, toilsome manhood, frail, often pitiful old age, the torments of final illness and finally the struggle with death — does it not look exactly as if existence were a blunder whose consequences inevitably and increasingly become apparent?

Welch ein Abstand ist doch zwischen unserm Anfang und unserm Ende! jener in dem Wahn der Begier und dem Entzücken der Wollust; dieses in der Zerstörung aller Organe und dem Moderdufte der Leichen. Auch geht der Weg zwischen Beiden, in Hinsicht auf Wohlseyn und Lebensgenuß, stetig bergab: die seelig träumende Kindheit, die fröhliche Jugend, das mühsälige Mannesalter, das gebrechliche, oft jämmerliche Greisenthum, die Marter der letzten Krankheit und endlich der Todeskampf; sieht es nicht geradezu aus, als wäre das Daseyn ein Fehltritt, dessen Folgen allmälig und immer mehr offenbar würden?