A man came to Buddha and asked him, “Tell me, Buddha, are you a god?” “No,” the Buddha replied. “I am not.” “Are you an angel, then?” he prodded. “No, I am not.” “Are you a prophet?” he asked. “No, not a prophet either,” was the calm reply. “Well, what are you then?” he demanded. Whereupon the Buddha answered, “I am awake.”
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The political philosopher Aristippus, paying court to the tyrant Denys, had acquired a comfortable living. He actively sneered at his less prosperous peers. Seeing the sage Diogenes washing some vegetables, he said disdainfully, “If you would only learn to flatter King Denys, you would not have to be washing lentils.” Diogenes replied, “If you had only learned to live on lentils, you would not have to flatter King Denys.”
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The celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan once wrote to George Bernard Shaw declaring that, given the principles of eugenics, they should have a child together. “Think of it!” she enthused. “With my body and your brains, what a wonder it would be.”
“Yes,” Shaw replied. “But what if it had my body and your brains?”
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