Passages about family and inheritance

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

Many things are terrible and wonderful, and nothing is more terrible and wonderful than man.

I was not born to share in hatred, but to share in love.

Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.

Tiresias tells Oedipus that his wisdom is dreadful when it brings its possessor no profit, and refuses at first to say what he knows.

Dionysus opens the play by naming himself, saying he has come to Thebes disguised as a man because his mother's sisters denied that Zeus fathered him and called her death a punishment for a lie.

Tiresias tells Pentheus that the new god gives wine, which relieves men of pain and gives them sleep, and that a city gains nothing by fighting a power it cannot see.

Zeus, who sets mortals on the way to understanding, has ordained the fixed law that wisdom comes by suffering.

The watchman on the roof says he has been lying there a year like a dog, learning the stars by heart, and that he would speak if the house could bear it, but an ox stands on his tongue.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!

Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.

Above him there was now nothing but the sky, the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds slowly creeping across it.

It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, I only most respectfully return Him the ticket.

Why hast Thou come now to hinder us?

Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay. But you'll have to be up with the lark, she added.

What is the meaning of life? That was all, a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Am I my brother's keeper?

Of all creatures that have breath and understanding, we women are the most wretched.

I would rather stand three times in the line of battle than give birth once.

My tongue swore, but my mind is unsworn.

We know the good and recognise it, but we do not work it out, some from idleness, and some from preferring some other pleasure to the good.

I walk on air and contemplate the sun.

Zeus? What Zeus? There is no Zeus.

I suffered those deeds more than I performed them.

Not to be born is best of all; and next best, by far, is to go back quickly where you came from.

I saw him, I blushed, I turned pale at the sight of him.

It is Venus entire, fastened on her prey.

Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual is higher than the universal.

He who loved himself became great by himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

A great ox stands upon my tongue.

Zeus, who sets mortals on the road to understanding, who made it law that by suffering they shall learn.

The mother is not the parent of what is called her child, but the nurse of the newly sown seed. The one who mounts is the parent.

This is my ruling: a tie in the votes acquits the man.

Pylades, what shall I do? Am I to feel shame at killing my mother?

Have pity, child, on this breast, where many times you drowsed and sucked the milk that made you.

I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness.

What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday.

Cover that bosom, which I cannot endure to look on. Such things damage the soul and stir up sinful thoughts.

There is a great difference between hypocrisy and devotion.

I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child.

Millions of women have done so.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

Is it not a pleasure to learn and to repeat or practise from time to time what has been learnt? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Thieves! Thieves! Assassins! Murderers! Justice, just heaven! I am undone, I am murdered, they have cut my throat, they have stolen my money.

Without a dowry.

A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.

I imagine the minds of children as easily turned this or that way as water itself.

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.

If you take the life-lie away from an average man, you take his happiness away with it.

I am the thirteenth at table.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish.

For a long time I went to bed early.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.

He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man's hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking.

It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

O Sugarman done fly away, Sugarman done gone, Sugarman cut across the sky, Sugarman gone home.

Saul was head and shoulders taller than any of the people. When Samuel said to all the people, Do you see him whom the Lord has chosen? there is none like him among all the people, all the people shouted, Long live the king!

You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?

Cicero writes to Atticus that he can bear his own exile, but not the destruction it has brought on his family, and asks his friend for nothing so much as continued honesty rather than comforting reassurance.

He tells Atticus he does not know which side to support, Caesar's or Pompey's, since he can see faults and dangers in both, and that indecision itself has become the most painful part of the whole crisis.

The Moralia collects Plutarch's seventy-eight surviving essays, dialogues and lectures on everything other than biography, including practical advice on listening to lectures, controlling anger, distinguishing a flatterer from a friend and consoling the bereaved.

The collection includes a defence of eating no meat, staking out an unusually early and considered position on animal ethics that extends moral consideration to non-human creatures in ways anticipating considerably later philosophical developments on this question.

Conaire is warned from the start that he must never let two of his foster-brothers commit robbery in his kingdom without punishment, and when circumstance eventually forces his hand against them, the exile he imposes plants the seed of the very vengeance that returns to destroy him.

Travelling toward the hostel of Dá Derga, Conaire finds himself compelled by a sequence of small circumstances, three red horsemen on the road, a hunting party, to break one geis after another, each transgression individually explicable and yet cumulatively fatal.

Marie names herself directly as the author of these twelve lais, stating that she is retelling stories she heard from Breton minstrels, a claimed source that frames her considerable shaping intelligence as preservation and translation rather than pure invention.

In Bisclavret, a knight who is secretly a werewolf is betrayed by his own wife, who steals his clothes to trap him permanently in wolf form, and the tale's actual moral center rests not in his lycanthropy itself but in her specific betrayal of his trust.

Siegfried, killer of a dragon and owner of the Nibelung treasure, comes to Worms to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian king Gunther, and helps Gunther by trickery to win the Icelandic queen Brünhild, a deception that will eventually prove fatal.

A quarrel between the two queens exposes the deceit by which Brünhild was won, and Gunther's vassal Hagen murders Siegfried and sinks the treasure in the Rhine, converting Kriemhild's husband's death and the lost treasure into a permanent grievance.

The Völuspá presents a seeress recounting the creation of the world and foretelling its destruction at Ragnarök within a single continuous vision, giving Norse mythology a comprehensive cosmic frame running from absolute beginning through prophesied end.

The Hávamál collects sayings attributed to Odin, blending everyday worldly wisdom about hospitality, friendship and caution directly alongside the god's own mythic self-sacrifice, refusing any clean separation between practical advice and cosmic religious knowledge.

Sigmund draws the sword that Odin thrust into the tree in Volsung's hall, which no other man could move, and the saga follows the sword through its breaking and reforging into the hand of his son Sigurd.

Sigurd kills the dragon Fafnir, wins its cursed gold, tastes its blood and understands the birds who warn him of Regin's treachery, and rides to wake the valkyrie Brynhild from her enchanted sleep.

Njal, a wise lawyer, and Gunnar of Hlidarendi, a formidable warrior, maintain a close friendship even as their wives Bergthora and Hallgerd feud with each other, a chain of killings and settlements running alongside the two men's own steady loyalty.

Gunnar is outlawed and killed at his home after refusing to leave Iceland as the law required, his attachment to his own land overriding clear knowledge of the danger this refusal would bring upon him.

The king sits in Dunfermline town drinking his blood-red wine, and asks where he might find a good sailor to sail his ship, and an old knight names Sir Patrick Spens, who receives the king's letter and laughs once, then weeps, knowing the voyage the season demands will drown him.

Two ravens sit discussing, in a tone of complete and chilling indifference, where they shall dine, and settle on a newly slain knight lying behind an old turf wall, known to no one but his hawk, his hound and his lady, who has already taken another mate.

Roper, who lived in More's household for sixteen years, records More's rise to Lord Chancellor and his conversations with Henry VIII in the garden at Chelsea, giving readers direct firsthand access to the personal dynamic between king and chancellor.

More refuses to swear the oath acknowledging the king's supremacy over the church, is imprisoned in the Tower, and is tried on the testimony of Richard Rich, Roper recording the actual pressures and arguments More faced rather than idealized retrospective summary.

The new king Edward recalls his favourite Gaveston from exile, provoking the barons, led by Mortimer, to force Gaveston out, only for Edward to bring him back before the barons finally capture and kill him, establishing the play's central conflict between royal favoritism and baronial political authority.

Queen Isabella, neglected by her husband's devotion to his favorites, eventually joins Mortimer and returns from France with an army, deposing Edward and placing his young son on the throne, a transformation from wronged wife to political conspirator the play develops with genuine dramatic care.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, tells the audience he is determined to prove a villain and sets out to remove everyone between himself and the throne, giving the play's central antagonist unsettling self-aware intelligence about his own moral status.

He woos Lady Anne over the corpse of the husband he killed, has his brother Clarence drowned in a wine butt, and has his young nephews murdered in the Tower after seizing the crown, escalating villainy through calculated rhetorical and physical cruelty.

Two sets of identical twins, both pairs separated as infants in a shipwreck, end up in the same city of Ephesus on the same day without knowing it, doubling the confusion beyond Shakespeare's classical Roman source's single pair of twins.

Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio are mistaken at every turn for their local twins, who are also called Antipholus and Dromio, entangling wives, merchants, a courtesan and a goldsmith in escalating confusion throughout the city.

Romeo Montague crashes a Capulet feast and falls in love with Juliet Capulet, and they are married in secret by Friar Laurence the next day, their love's compressed timeframe giving it genuinely dangerous intensity from its very first meeting.

Romeo kills Juliet's cousin Tybalt to avenge his friend Mercutio and is banished, demonstrating how thoroughly the older generation's feud reasserts itself even within the younger generation's attempted escape from it through violent, inherited obligation.

The rebellion continues after Shrewsbury but is ended by a trick, when Prince John promises the rebel lords redress and then arrests them once their army disperses, stages political victory through betrayal of given word rather than honorable combat.

Falstaff, now old and ill, recruits soldiers in Gloucestershire and dines with Justice Shallow, while the sick king broods on the crown he took, giving the play's comic relief genuine melancholy undertone alongside the king's own mortality.

Simon Eyre greets his workers each morning with a torrent of boisterous, half-nonsensical exclamations and endearments, mad Hyperboreans and princes among prentices, establishing from his first appearance the exuberant comic energy that carries the play.

Rowland Lacy disguises himself as a Dutch shoemaker, Hans, and takes work in Eyre's shop specifically to remain near Rose after being forbidden by his uncle the Earl to marry her, a disguise plot that lets a gentleman move, temporarily and by choice, into the working world the play otherwise celebrates.

Caius Martius, a Roman patrician and unmatched soldier, wins the surname Coriolanus by taking the Volscian city of Corioli almost single-handed, put forward for consul but unable to flatter the common people whose votes he needs.

The tribunes provoke him into contempt that gets him banished, and he joins his old enemy Aufidius and leads the Volscians against Rome, personal grievance against the city that rejected him overriding whatever patriotic loyalty his service there might command.

Leontes, king of Sicilia, suddenly convinces himself that his pregnant wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia, staging jealousy as genuinely irrational psychological eruption rather than response to actual evidence.

He imprisons Hermione, has the newborn daughter abandoned on the Bohemian coast, and learns from the oracle that he was wrong just as his son and, apparently, his wife die, one man's delusion inflicting cascading harm across his entire family.

The widowed Duchess secretly marries her steward Antonio, wooing him herself since he cannot woo her, against the wishes of her brothers, who have set the malcontent Bosola to spy on her.

Ferdinand torments the imprisoned Duchess with a dead man's hand, wax figures of her husband and children, and a chorus of madmen, and then has Bosola strangle her, her children and her maid; she dies saying, I am Duchess of Malfi still.

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction, and the greatest good is small, for all of life is a dream, and dreams themselves are a dream.

I dream that I am here, weighed down by these chains, and I dreamed that I saw myself in another, more flattering state. What is life? A frenzy.

Rodrigue asks himself whether he should avenge his father and lose Chimène, or keep Chimène and live with a father's dishonor, and concludes that a single moment's hesitation would itself be a second, unforgivable dishonor added to the first.

Chimène tells the king that she demands Rodrigue's death not because her love for him has died, but precisely because it has not, and that only justice, not diminished feeling, drives her to ask for his execution.

Andromache, Hector's widow, is the captive of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who loves her and will spare her son Astyanax only if she marries him, weaponizing his considerable political power over a captive woman into coercive romantic leverage.

Andromache agrees to marry Pyrrhus intending to kill herself afterwards, staging maternal duty and personal integrity in irreconcilable tension, accepting a repugnant marriage purely to save her son while privately refusing to actually survive the compromise.

Monsieur Jourdain, a rich cloth merchant's son, spends his money on masters of music, dancing, fencing and philosophy in the hope of passing as a nobleman, and discovers with delight that he has been speaking prose all his life.

Jourdain refuses to let his daughter marry a commoner despite being a commoner himself by birth, so her suitor disguises himself as the son of the Grand Turk and confers a bogus title on Jourdain in an elaborate mock ceremony.

Argan is a healthy man convinced he is dying, surrounded by doctors and apothecaries who profit from his fear, a hypochondriac whose imaginary illness sustains an entire household economy built around treating a sickness that does not actually exist.

Argan wants to marry his daughter Angélique to a young physician so that he can have medical care in the family, while his second wife waits for him to die and leave her everything, two competing mercenary interests converging on his household.

Penn's collection of some 850 numbered maxims and reflections, published anonymously while he was in hiding from political enemies in England, offers plain practical advice in the manner of Proverbs, grouped under headings such as Ignorance, Education, Luxury, Friendship, Government and Religion.

Penn's maxims carry a distinctive Quaker stress on simplicity, honesty, moderation, the inner light and the equal worth of all people, grounding practical worldly advice in a specific theological commitment to universal human dignity throughout the collection.

Squire Allworthy discovers an infant left in his own bed, and, moved by the child's helplessness, resolves to raise him as his own despite knowing nothing of his actual parentage, naming him Tom Jones and raising him alongside his sister's son Blifil as presumptive co-heirs to his estate.

Blifil's carefully managed scheming, presented outwardly as pious concern for his uncle's welfare and Tom's own moral correction, gradually poisons Squire Allworthy's opinion of Tom until Tom is banished from the household entirely, a banishment the narrator makes clear stems from Blifil's calculated self-interest rather than any genuine moral failing serious enough to warrant it.

Tristram sets out to tell his life and opinions but cannot get himself born until volume three, since every fact requires a digression, making narrative delay itself the novel's genuine formal subject rather than merely an obstacle to proper storytelling.

The book is really about his father Walter, a theorist of names and noses, his gentle Uncle Toby, who refights the siege of Namur in the garden, and the Widow Wadman's campaign for Toby, populating the novel with figures more vivid than Tristram himself.

Tony Lumpkin, delighting in mischief, misdirects the traveling Marlow and his friend Hastings, convincing them that the Hardcastle family home is actually a country inn, a prank that sets the entire subsequent plot of mistaken identity and comic misunderstanding in motion.

Marlow, believing Mr. Hardcastle to be an innkeeper rather than his own prospective father-in-law, treats the older man with an easy, presumptuous familiarity entirely unlike the deference he would show if he understood the actual social relationship between them, producing sustained comic confusion neither man is able to resolve for some time.

Lady Sneerwell's circle manufactures scandal for sport, and the brothers Surface are its subjects: Joseph, a hypocrite of fine sentiments, and Charles, an open-handed spendthrift who is the better man, staging gossip as genuine social institution.

Their rich uncle Sir Oliver returns from India in disguise to test them, staging character assessment through deliberate deception, the brothers revealing their genuine natures without knowing they are actually being evaluated for the inheritance at stake.

Hermann, the prosperous innkeeper's son, brings a cart loaded with clothing and provisions out to the refugees passing through the town, and among them notices Dorothea, a young woman managing and caring for the displaced families around her with a competence and dignity that immediately strikes him.

Hermann's father makes clear he wants a richer match for his son than a penniless refugee could provide, prompting Hermann's mother, more sympathetic to her son's actual feelings, to send the pastor and the apothecary out among the refugees to make careful, discreet inquiries into Dorothea's actual character and background.

Under the tyranny of the Habsburg governor Gessler, the men of three forest cantons swear an oath of resistance on the Rütli meadow, giving collective political rebellion a specific founding ritual moment distinct from any individual act of defiance.

The hunter Tell, who has kept apart from politics, refuses to bow to Gessler's hat on a pole, is forced to shoot an apple from his son's head, staging tyranny's cruelty in unforgettably concrete and personal form beyond abstract political grievance.

Goethe's title itself, Poetry and Truth, announces directly that the account which follows will inevitably blend invented shaping with remembered fact, a warning to readers that even his own apparently candid retrospective narrative cannot escape the transforming pressure memory and narrative form exert on lived experience.

He describes his friendship with Herder, met during his student years, as genuinely transformative, crediting Herder's ideas about language, history and the organic development of national culture with reshaping his own understanding of what literature could actually be and do.

Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in the forest by parents who can no longer feed them, follow a trail of breadcrumbs that birds eat before they can retrace their steps, and are lured by hunger to a house made of bread, cake and sugar belonging to a witch who intends to eat them.

Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters mutilate their own feet, cutting off toe and heel, in a failed attempt to fit the golden slipper, and at the wedding birds peck out the stepsisters' eyes as punishment for their cruelty, a considerably harsher conclusion than most later popular versions retain.

My hair is grey, but not with years, / Nor grew it white / In a single night, / As men's have grown from sudden fears.

I had a brother, who to me was more than father, mother, brother, all, and I had a sister who was more than any of the rest.

Count Francesco Cenci, a nobleman whose crimes the Pope repeatedly pardons for money, celebrates the deaths of two of his sons and then rapes his daughter Beatrice, escalating cruelty that institutional authority has repeatedly enabled rather than restrained.

With her stepmother and brother, Beatrice hires assassins to kill her father, choosing private violence as the only available response after institutional authority has repeatedly failed to check or punish his crimes against her and her family.

In certain provincial houses there are faces marked by no more expression than is on the face of an ox at pasture, and it is thus that the town of Saumur described the face of old Grandet.

Gold in itself is nothing, said Grandet, it is only good for turning into gold.

All is true.

Paris, its houses, its heights, its low quarters, all of it seemed to say to him, now it is between the two of us.

Fabrizio del Dongo, a young Lombard aristocrat, runs off to fight for Napoleon and wanders lost across the field of Waterloo without understanding what he sees, deflating epic military legend through a naive young participant's confused, fragmentary experience.

His aunt Gina, the Duchess Sanseverina, and her lover Count Mosca, the prime minister of Parma, manoeuvre to advance Fabrizio in the Church, demonstrating how personal advancement depends on calculated intrigue rather than genuine merit or vocation.

There is a vice called Cruelty, and this Sin of thine is crueler than any name Vice ever wore.

I am he that stabbed his friend, and sister's lover, ignorant of both, in the mere darkness of a jealous fit.

Lisbeth Fischer, being still unmarried at forty-two, was nicknamed Cousin Bette in the family.

Vice always finds a defender to plead for it, whereas virtue, when it has no reward, finds nothing but incredulity.