1. Ecclesiastes 1:9: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be ... and there is no new thing under the sun." Cf. Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1688): "We come too late to say anything which has not been said already." La Bruyère probably stole his line from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): "We can say nothing but what hath been said." Burton probably stole his line from Terence's Eunuchus (161 B.C.): "Nothing is said that has not been said before." I stole the idea of comparing these four lines from a footnote in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.