If you were to offer a thirsty man all wisdom, you would not please him more than if you gave him a drink.

The well-being of a man is that everyone be his slave.

that every man should have as much as he could make use of, would hold still in the world, without straitening any body;

Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.

Men are like wine-some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.

a man can be given only what he can use; and he can use only that for which he has sacrificed something

Look at me. This is nobility in a man:
to bear what falls from the gods and not say No.

He who would love his fellow man
Must not expect too much of him.

Man should not consider his material possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need

"The Prophet said, "Live with each man according to his habits and disposition,

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called <i>entheos</i>, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament — the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana — is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great <i>brio</i> and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.

The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.

Every man is a volume, if you know how to read him.

A man abandoned by himself on a desert island would adorn neither his hut nor his person; nor would he seek for flowers, still less would he plant them, in order to adorn himself therewith. It is only in society that it occurs to him to be not merely a man, but a refined man after his kind (the beginning of civilization). For such do we judge him to be who is both inclined and apt to communicate his pleasure to others, and who is not contented with an object if he cannot feel satisfaction in it in common with others. Again, every one expects and requires from every one else this reference to universal communication of pleasure, as it were from an original compact dictated by humanity itself.