Menander Quotes

As rust corrupts iron, so envy corrupts man.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.

I believe that time destroys everything. You can take one beautiful apple, red. After a while, it becomes shrivelled and full of worms, just like what happens to us.

The rottenness of the matter which is the foundation of everything!

Great power which incites great envy, hurls some men to destruction; they are drowned in a long splendid stream of honors.

Oh, what a vileness human beauty is; corroding, corrupting everything it touches.

It is idleness that is the curse of man - not labour. Idleness eats the heart out of men as of nations, and consumes them as rust does iron.

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.

Never underestimate the power of jealousy and the power of envy to destroy. Never underestimate that.

. . . if gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust. . . .

The vessel, though her masts be firm,Beneath her copper bears a worm.

Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.

I don't think that disasters have to be spectacular. They can be a slow corrosion.

In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most truly captured. What is a ruin but time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time.

Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth. Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.

An envious man waxeth lean with the fatness of his neighbors. Envy is the daughter of pride, the author of murder and revenge, the beginner of secret sedition and the perpetual tormentor of virtue. Envy is the filthy slime of the soul; a venom, a poison, or quicksilver which consumeth the flesh and drieth up the marrow of the bones.

If gold rusts, what then can iron do?

Devouring Time and envious Age, all things yield to you; and with lingering death you destroy, step by step, with venomed tooth whatever you attack.

Now I see Peace to corrupt no less than war to waste.

Oh heavy change. The world deteriorates like a rotting apple, worms and a skin.

Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery: nothing else holds fashion.

American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.

As a moth gnaws a garment, so doth envy consume a man.