‘To appreciate this Earth is for the gods; I am merely covered in dust.’
A powerful sentiment, later echoed by Marcus Tullius Cicero, who wrote:
To be content with what we possess is the greatest and most secure of riches; to aspire to be more is the greatest and most certain of miseries. The immortal gods have given us a life in which nothing is stable, nothing lasting, nothing of our own; they have lent us the world as though it were a hostel, and not a home; and as transient guests of the world, they have given us nothing as our own except the power of action.
And much later by MIka Waltari in Sinuhe The Egyptian:
‘And yet I knew that the gods had planned otherwise, for Fate is a web woven long and well by unseen hands, and no man may escape its threads. Thus, I found myself swept along its currents, a mere mortal adrift in a sea of divine design.’
* Sumerian text sourced from The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature-over 400 literary works composed in the Sumerian language in ancient Mesopotamia during the late third and early second millennia BC.
