concept

enemies Quotes

100+ of the best book quotes about enemies
01
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“Has not one of the poets said that a noble friend is the best gift and a noble enemy the next best?”
C. S. Lewis
author
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle
book
gifts
enemies
friends
concepts
02
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“As more and more footage rolls, showing the marble façade of the courthouse explode into dust or a diamondglass wall withstanding a fireball, part of me feels happy. The Silvers are not invincible. They have enemies, enemies who can hurt them, and for once, they aren’t hiding behind a Red shield.”
Mare Barrow
character
03
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“Ego is its own worst enemy. It hurts the ones we love too. Our families and friends suffer for it. So do our customers, fans, and clients. A critic of napoleon nailed it when remarking: ‘He [Napoleon] despises the nation whose applause he seeks.’ He couldn’t help but see the French people as pieces to be manipulated, people he had to be better than, people who, unless they were totally, unconditionally supportive of him, were against him.”
04
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“When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness.”
05
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“Even if you are aware that you may be struck down today and are firmly resolved to an inevitable death, if you are slain with an unseemly appearance, you will show your lack of previous resolve, will be despised by your enemy, and will appear unclean. For this reason it is said that both old and young should take care of their appearance.”
06
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“They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”
07
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“My high charms work, And these, mine enemies, are all knit up In their distractions. They now are in my power.”
08
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“You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. ‘Everyone has something good about them.’ She said. ‘You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.‘”
09
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“Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy’s hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. In such love there is no inner discord between private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all.”
10
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“When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness.”
11
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“The will of God, to which the law gives expression, is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.”
12
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“The Helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their number who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high-spirited and the most apt to rebel. As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom. The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew how each of them perished.”
13
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“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
1984
book
enemies
concept
14
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“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”
1984
book
enemies
health
concepts
15
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“You provided us with a common enemy. You allied us.”
16
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“The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy’s useful actions but allow his useless actions.”
17
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“If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end (which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only) endeavour to destroy or subdue one another.”
18
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“The attaining to this sovereign power is by two ways. One, by natural force: as when a man maketh his children to submit themselves, and their children, to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by war subdueth his enemies to his will, giving them their lives on that condition. The other, is when men agree amongst themselves to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others.”
19
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“When you are thoroughly conversant with strategy, you will recognize the enemy’s intentions and thus have many opportunities to win.”
20
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“The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows, Are proud and implacable passionate foes; It is always the same, wherever one goes. And the Pugs and the Poms, although most people say That they do not like fighting, yet once in a way, They will now and again join in to the fray And they Bark bark bark bark Bark bark BARK BARK Until you can hear them all over the Park.”
21
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“Let us never desire to meet with an enemy or promote ourselves as if we could do better when we hear of others who have suffered defeat.”
22
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“Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye Than twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet, And I am proof against their enmity.”
23
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“What about Jacob? What was I going to do about him? My former best friend who was now...what? My enemy?”
24
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“Ego is the enemy- giving us wicked feedback, disconnected from reality. It’s defensive, precisely when we cannot afford to be defensive. It blocks us from improving by telling us that we don’t need to improve. Then we wonder why we don’t get the results we want, why others are better and why their success is more lasting.”
25
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“My only love sprung from my only hate.”
26
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“I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain.”
27
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“Thus the expert in battle moves the enemy, and is not moved by him.”
Sun Tzu
author
war
enemies
concepts
28
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″‘He believed her because here in the shadowy light of the stronghold everything seemed possible. Between the two of them they owned the world and no enemy, Gary Fulcher, Wanda Kay Moore, Janice Avery, Jess’s own fears and insufficiencies, nor any of the foes whom Leslie imagined attacking Terabithia, could ever really defeat them.‘”
29
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“When you wear the weed of impatience in your heart instead of the flower Acceptance-with-Joy, you will always find your enemies get an advantage over you.”
30
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“I must warn you that I see your enemies lurking among the trees ahead, and if you ever let Craven Fear begin painting a picture on the screen of your imagination, you will walk with fear and trembling and agony, where no fear is.”
31
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“Miss Everdeen I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other.”
32
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You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.
33
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“Heart pounding, adrenaline burning through me, everyone is my enemy. Except Gale. My hunting partner, the person who has my back. There’s nothing to do but move forward, killing whoever come into our path.”
34
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“Fools of little understanding have themselves for their greatest enemies, for they do evil deeds which must bear bitter fruits.”
35
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“The greatest enemy is one that has nothing to lose.”
36
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“To resist occupation, whether you’re a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line.”
37
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“Enjoy thy triumph; soon or late thou’lt find Thou art an enemy to thyself.”
38
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“‘That was a tough year. I wasn’t liked at all,’ he later said. ‘I demanded they do better, so I made a lot of enemies.’”
39
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“It was an odd thing, but true, that the death of an enemy could affect you as much almost as much as the death of a friend.”
40
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“Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world’s enemy, and she must stifle it.”
41
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“As he gazed at it suddenly Sam understood, almost with a shock, that this stronghold had been built not to keep enemies out of Mordor, but to keep them in.”
42
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“To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason?”
43
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“Common hatred unites the most heterogeneous elements. To share a common hatred, with an enemy even, is to infect him with a feeling of kinship, and thus sap his powers of resistance.”
44
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“Then justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil to enemies.”
Plato
author
Polemarchus
character
45
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“He was calmly eating his soup, laughing with pleasant good-humour, as if he had come all the way to Calais for the express purpose of enjoying supper at this filthy inn, in the company of his arch-enemy.”
46
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“Celerity is never more admired Than by the negligent. ”
47
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“This was one of the consequences of the civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy. Even people who knew you became extremely careful about how they related or spoke to you.”
48
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“My foes I do repute you every one; So trouble me no more, but get you gone.”
49
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“A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.”
50
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″‘Rochefort,’ said the cardinal, ‘you see M. D’Artagnan- I receive him among the number of my friends; embrace, then, and be prudent, if you have any wish to preserve your heads.‘”
51
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I am your enemy, the first one you’ve ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on I am your teacher.
52
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Since when do you have to tell the enemy when he has won?
53
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“If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”
54
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“It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill.”
55
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“Bravery is always respected, even in an enemy.”
56
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“Well, I won’t. But I gotta do something. It seems like there’s gotta be someplace without greasers or Socs, with just people. Plain, ordinary people.”
Johnny Cade
character
enemies
people
concepts
57
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“They ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle to their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting for their enemies to destroy them.”
Plato
author
Socrates
character
58
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“When the white man dies, he thinks he is at peace, but the red men know how to torture even the ghosts of their enemies.”
59
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“I walked hand in hand with my enemy, allowed their kiss of death to linger on my lips while the world disintegrated around me. I couldn’t see through the smoke and mirrors; too consumed with fighting a destiny I didn’t want; too afraid to let go of a life I wasn’t meant to have.”
60
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“The most dangerous enemy is not the one who lingers behind you in the shadows, but the one who walks beside you as a friend.”
61
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“Five people—five frightened people. Five people who watched each other, who now hardly troubled to hide the state of their nervous tension. There was little pretense now….They were five enemies linked together by a mutual instinct of self-preservation.”
62
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Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.
63
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“Of those we have wronged, and of our enemies or rivals, it is not the passionate and outspoken whom we have to fear, but the quiet, dissembling, unscrupulous; since we never know when they are upon us, we can never be sure they are at a safe distance.”
64
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“Though ... vast multitudes of God’s enemies combine and associate themselves, they are easily broken in pieces: they are as great heaps of light chaff before the whirlwind; or large quantities of dry stubble before devouring flames.”
65
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“Let not the piece of virtue which is set Betwixt us, as the cement of our love To keep it builded, be the ram to batter The fortress of it. For better might we Have loved without this mean, if on both parts This not be cherished.”
66
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“Today may be the enemy of your tomorrow. In your business and perhaps your life, the tomorrow that you desire and envision may never come to pass if you do not end some things you are doing today.”
67
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“It is the hate that is the enemy. Not men. Hate does not die with killing. It only springs up a hundredfold. The only thing stronger than hate is love.”
68
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Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.
69
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″For Jessica, it was easier to think of me as Bad Hannah than as the Hannah she got to know at Monet’s. It was easier to accept. Easier to understand. For her, the rumors needed to be true.”
70
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“The most dangerous enemy is that which no one fears!”
71
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“How fine you look when dressed in rage. Your enemies are fortunate your condition is not permanent. You’re lucky, too. Red eyes suit so few.”
72
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“I suppose I’ll have to add the force of gravity to my list of enemies.”
73
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“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”
1984
book
fight
enemies
concepts
74
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“It is easy to love your friend, but sometimes the hardest lesson to learn is to love your enemy.”
Sun Tzu
author
love
war
enemies
concepts
75
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“Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.”
76
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“If you don’t make a few enemies every now and then, you’re a coward . . . ”
77
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“O! why rebuke you him that loves you so? Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.”
78
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“But on you will go though the weather be foul. On you will go though your enemies prowl. On you will go though the Hakken-Kraks howl. Onward up many a frightening creek, though your arms may get sore and your sneakers may leak.”
79
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“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!”
80
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In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.
81
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“That’s stupid, I thought swiftly, they’ve both come here to fight and they’re both supposed to be smarter than that. What difference does the side make?”
82
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Give me honorable enemies rather than ambitious ones, and I’ll sleep more easily by night.
83
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Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.
84
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A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.
85
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“Let’s have a toast. To the incompetence of our enemies.”
86
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“Ordinary people—and ordinary Germans—cannot be expected to tolerate activities which outrage the ordinary sense of ordinary decency unless the victims are, in advance, successfully stigmatized as enemies of the people, of the nation, the race, the religion. Or, if they are not enemies (that comes later), they must be an element within the community somehow extrinsic to the common bond, a decompositive ferment (be it only by the way they part their hair or tie their necktie) in the uniformity which is everywhere the condition of common quiet. The Germans’ innocuous acceptance and practice of social anti-Semitism before Hitlerism had undermined the resistance of their ordinary decency to the stigmatization and persecution to come.”
87
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“Oh, about beer I never lie,” Crandall said. “A man who lies about beer makes enemies.”
88
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“Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilization is confronted with militant Mahommedanism.”
89
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″... the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. ”
90
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“Let the enemies in our land be reconciled, but let reformation be the foundation.”
91
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“At every doorway before you enter, you should look around, you should take a good look around--for you never know where your enemies might be seated within.”
92
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″‘Kate is quite capable of pushing me into a river hill filled with piranhas,’ Alex blurted out. ‘With a grandmother like mine, I don’t need enemies.‘”
93
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“Criminal lawyers journalists are not enemies, the former need advertisement, the latter information.”
94
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″‘There are two things I’m quite certain of,’ I remarked, as we discussed the day’s doings while we brushed and plaited our hair. ‘I shall dislike Ernestine Salt exceedingly, but I’ve simply fallen in love with Catherine Winstanley.‘”
95
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“They were like two enemies in love with one another.”
96
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“Stamp, your name is to be Laura. I’m sharing my name with you. I’m putting my power into you and you must do my work. Don’t listen to anyone but me. You are to be my command laid on my enemy.”
97
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“You are to be my command laid on my enemy. You’ll make a hole in him through which he’ll drip away until he runs dry. As he drips out darkness, we’ll smile together, me outside, you inside. We’ll... we’ll crush him between our smiles.”
98
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“I remember alike those who sought my life with stones and those who gave me food- lay aside therefore your fears. I return as an enemy only to those who injured me.”
99
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“That Birk- after all, she had been pleased when she first saw him! And now, when she had met someone of her own age at last, why did it have to be a nasty little Borka robber.”
100
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“Nice is the enemy of interesting.”
101
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“Lauren brilliantly wields familiar rom-com tropes—enemies to lovers, fake marriage, even height differences—to craft a delightful romance that will have readers hanging on every word.”
102
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“Want to keep Christ in Christmas? Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the guilty, welcome the unwanted, care for the ill, love your enemies, and do unto others as you would have done unto you.”
103
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“Happiness. The enemy of all suffering.”
104
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“There was nothing worse than having to feel sorry for people who had wronged you. You don’t want lottery wins for your enemies, but you don’t want tragedies for them either.”
105
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“It is a tale of how I will take from my enemy what the law says is mine.”
106
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“Enemies-to-lovers—it’s our trope, Buxbaum.”
107
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“I thought cats and mice were enemies.”
108
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“It is said that one should keep one’s allies within view, and one’s enemies within reach.”
Thrawn
book
enemies
allies
concepts
109
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“There was not a boy on the wharf Johnny did not know. He had made friends with some and enemies of others, and had played or fought with all of them. […] Seemingly in one month he had become a stranger, an outcast on Hancock’s wharf. He was maimed and they were whole.”
110
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″‘Do you think we’re going to leave this bath now?’ said Beaver Hateman, going menacingly to to Uncle. ‘Yes, I do!’ ‘Well, you’re jolly well wrong! I’m going to stay here all night, if I want to!‘”
111
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″‘Ah, the mangy one!’ exclaimed the king of England. ‘The cruelest of all my enemies. He finally got what was coming to him. So you, valiant youth, are my godson! You shall marry my daughter and inherit my kingdom.‘”
112
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“Crush’ is too weak a word to describe how I feel. It doesn’t do you justice, but maybe it works for me. I am the one who is crushed. I’m crushed that we have only ever regarded each other as enemies. I’m crushed when the day ends and I haven’t said anything to you that isn’t cloaked in five layers of sarcasm.”
113
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“Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.”
114
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″‘My idea,’ said Nancy Blackett, ‘is an alliance against all enemies, especially Uncle Jim- Captain Flint, I mean. But we want the sort of alliance that will let us fight each other if we want to.’ ‘That’s not an alliance,’ said Titty, ‘that’s a treaty, a treaty of offense and defense.‘”
115
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“Kevin and Sadie used to be enemies but now at 17 and 18 years old, they meet again and end up falling in love at a time when no-one wants them to be together.”
116
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“You are to be proud of your enemy; then the success of your enemy is your success also.”
117
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“Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken.”

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