Cicero Quotes

The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as one nears the journey's end.

In the conduct of almost every affair slowness and procrastination are hateful

I hope that the memory of our friendship will be everlasting.

Fortune, not wisdom, rules lives.

The happiest end of life is this: when the mind and the other senses being unimpaired, the same nature which put it together takes asunder her own work.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

I speak of that learning which wakes us acquainted with the boundless extent of nature, and the universe, and which even while we remain in this world, discovers to us both heaven, earth, and sea.

Let flattery, the handmaid of the vices, be far removed (from friendship). [Lat., Assentatio, vitiorum adjutrix, procul amoveatur.]

We are all excited by the love of praise, and the noblest are most influenced by glory.

In extraordinary events ignorance of their causes produces astonishment.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

There were poets before Homer.

Not to be covetous, is money; not to be a purchaser, is a revenue.

The forehead is the gate of the mind.

Silent enim leges inter arma (Laws are silent in times of war).

Men in no way approach so nearly to the gods as in doing good to men. [Lat., Homines ad deos nulla re propius accedunt, quam salutem hominibus dando.]

Everything that thou reprovest in another, thou must most carefully avoid in thyself. [Lat., Omnia quae vindicaris in altero, tibi ipsi vehementer fugienda sunt.]

The greatest incitement to guilt is the hope of sinning with impunity.

For my own part, I had rather be old only a short time than be old before I really am so.

No grief is so acute but time ameliorates it.

There are some duties we owe even to those who have wronged us. There is, after all, a limit to retribution and punishment.

In honorable dealing you should consider what you intended, not what you said or thought.

"What greater gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?"

The proof of a well-trained mind is that it rejoices in which is good and grieves at the opposite.

Old age, especially an honored old age, has so great authority, that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth.

The popular breeze - Aura popularis

Let reason govern desire.

It is the stain and disgrace of the age to envy virtue, and to be anxious to crush the very flower of dignity.

For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends.

The chief recommendation is modesty, then dutiful conduct toward parents, then affection for kindred.

Plato divinely calls pleasure the bait of evil, inasmuch as men are caught by it as fish by a hook.

Nothing is so great an adversary to those who make it their business to please as expectation.

Always the same thing.

Men resemble the gods in nothing so much as in doing good to their fellow creatures.

Nothing is more disgraceful than insincerity.

To be endowed with strength by nature, to be actuated by the powers of the mind, and to have a certain spirit almost divine infused into you.

Everyone cleaves to the doctrine he has happened upon, as to a rock against which he has been thrown by tempest.

Exile is terrible to those who have, as it were, a circumscribed habitation; but not to those who look upon the whole globe but as one city.

The foolishness of old age does not characterize all who are old, but only the foolish.

He who hangs on the errors of the ignorant multitude, must not be counted among great men.

There is nothing better fitted to delight the reader than change of circumstances and varieties of fortune.

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

In the very books in which philosophers bid us scorn fame, they inscribe their names.

Virtue is uniform, conformable to reason, and of unvarying consistency; nothing can be added to it that can make it more than virtue; nothing can be taken from it, and the name of virtue be left.

All the arts, which have a tendency to raise man in the scale of being, have a certain common band of union, and are connected, if I may be allowed to say so, by blood-relationship with one another.

Can any one find in what condition his body will be, I do not say a year hence, but this evening?

Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due.

What gift has providence bestowed on man that is so dear to him as his children?

It shows nobility to be willing to increase your debt to a man to whom you already owe much.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.