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If food is left over, the mongoose consume it; If it leaves any food for me, the stranger consumes it.

— Sumerian Proverbs by Edmund I. Gordon

To be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear. To take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer.

What does that mean, to be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear? Favor debases: we fear to lose it, fear to win it. So to be in favor or disgrace is to live in fear.

What does that mean, to take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer? I suffer because I'm a body; if I weren't a body, how could I suffer?

— Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching by Ursula K. Le Guin, Laozi

Birds are not difficult to understand. Their behavior tells me what they are thinking. Generally it runs along the lines of: Is this food? Is this? What about this? This might be food. I am almost certain that this is. Or occasionally: It is raining. I do not like it.

While ample for a brief neighborly exchange, such remarks do not suggest a broad or deep intelligence. Yet it has occurred to me that there may be more wisdom in birds than appears at first sight, a wisdom that reveals itself only obliquely and intermittently,

— Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

But worker cooperatives, no matter how successful they might be, cannot be seen as an end in themselves when they are located with a capitalist economy. In the best circumstances, the forestry worker cooperatives of the Northwest may provide examples of something more vital -- of how people who organize in cooperative and egalitarian ways can reach out to more oppressed and exploited people around then and demonstrate a viable alternative to traditional work organizations.

— Worker Cooperatives in America by Robert Jackall, Henry M. Levin

'Wit you well,' said Sir Launcelot, 'I may not ride with you, for I have many deeds to do in other places, that this time I may not avide with you.'

— Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory

'Tea, tea, tea—what! What!' I said.

It wasn't what I had meant to say. My idea had been to be a good deal more formal, and so on. Still, it covered the situation.

— Carry on, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse

... near the very beginning of the document, one of these worthies addresses the other as follows:

You dolt, numbskull, school pest, you illiterate, you Sumerian ignoramus, you hand is terrible; it cannot even hold the stylus properly; it is unfit for writing and cannot take dictation. (And yet you say) you are a scribe like me.

To this the other worthy answers:

What do you mean I am not a scribe like you? When you write a document it makes no sense. When you write a letter it is illegible. You go to divide up an estate, but are unable to divide up the estate. For when you go to survey the field, you can't hold the measuring line. You can't hold a nail in your hand; you have no sense. You don't know how to arbitrate between contesting parties; you aggravate the struggle between brothers. You are one of the most incompetent of tablet writers. What are you fit for, can any one say?

— The Sumerians by Samuel Noah Kramer