A Quote by Thomas Hobbes

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

Thomas Hobbes

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Ancient Authors Competition Dead Envy Living Mutual Praise Reverence

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Thomas Hobbes
English - Philosopher
April 5, 1588 - December 4, 1679

Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.

Thomas Hobbes

Expect not praise without envy until you are dead.

Charles Caleb Colton

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.

Richard Stallman

The living will envy the dead.

Nikita Khrushchev

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.

Mark Twain

Envy feeds on the living. It ceases when they are dead.

Ovid

When we are dead : it is the living only who cannot be forgiven the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind .

George Eliot

Fools may our scorn, not envy, raise. For envy is a kind of praise.

John Gay

Envy honors the dead in order to insult the living.

Claude Adrien Helvetius

Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living.

Henry Fuseli

It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Nathanael Howe

And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said-and she had the Sight-Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living! And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels-or devils.

Kerry Greenwood

Regardless of whether the authors I've translated have been "dead and canonized," or "living and established," or even simply "emerging," I must put myself to the same, old test: "can I do their texts justice?" I've translated twenty-one books, and except for three commissions, I "hand-picked" all my authors on the basis of whether my own peculiar idiosyncrasies would complement their own.

Andre Naffis-Sahely

Reverence is an attitude of honoring life. Reverence automatically brings forth patience. Reverence permits non-judgemental justice. Reverence is a perception of the soul.

Gary Zukav

We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.

Thomas Carlyle

A Quote by Thomas Hobbes

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