It is a characteristic of reality that it tends to smack you in the face like a three-day-old dead fish

I love how old wisdom echoes, often unrecognized, down to today. I just posted a Cicero quote, "Time obliterates the fictions of opinion, and confirms the decisions of nature."

A few minutes later I scan this opinion by Sarah Hoyt complaining about the ignorant first-world-problemism of a tweet. In her takedown she comments:

The world is REAL – an unforgiving place that doesn’t care anymore about your imagination and empathy and happiness than it cares about whether that storm just destroyed your crops; that hurricane just leveled your house; or that sparrow just fell.

[snip]

It is a characteristic of reality that it tends to smack you in the face like a three-day-old dead fish whether you want it to or not, and whether you’ve told yourself some just-so story about how it would be so much better if it didn’t.

What she loses to the pure brevity of Cicero, she makes up for in colorful and pointed language, but she is saying much the same thing as Cicero some 2,000 years ago.