He—in whose nature, is the ugly disposition — Saadi

"How hast thou so profound a lore attained?" "To ask another, I was ne’er ashamed."

"In Suna’s town, my child’s life passed away; How can I tell the sadness of that day! As fair as Joseph, God creates a slave; Then, Jonah-like, he’s swallow’d by the grave. In this fair world, scarce grown, the cypress form Uprooted is, by death’s relentless storm. It is not strange the rose on earth should grow, So many rose-like bodies sleep below. Madly I longed to see his form once more, So off the tomb the weighty stone I tore. Fear seized me in that place, so dark and strange: It made me shake, and all my color change. Then came a voice (my child’s) from out the bier: "Dost thou feel terror at this darksome sight? Live, then, with care, and let thy works be bright. If thou dost wish thy grave as light as day, Illume life’s lamp with virtue’s shining ray." Saadi, he eats the fruit who plants the tree; Who sows the seed will fruitful harvests see."

"When the belly is empty, the body becomes spirit; when it is full, the spirit becomes body."

"Our condition is like the darting lightning, one instant flashing and the next disappearing. Sometimes we are seated above the fourth heaven, and at other times we cannot see the back of our feet."

"Have patience! All things are difficult before they become easy."

"Whoever interrupts the conversation of others to make a display of his own fund of knowledge, makes notorious his own stock of ignorance."

"Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation."

"The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive."

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!"

"All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair — The bees are stirring — birds are on the wing — And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing."

"Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former."