Quote collection
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"We ought not to confine ourselves either to writing or to reading; the one, continuous writing, will cast a gloom over our strength, and exhaust it; the other will make our strength flabby and watery. It is better to have recourse to them alternately, and to blend one with the other, so that the fruits of one's reading may be reduced to concrete form by the pen."
"The real compensation of a right action is inherent in having performed it."
"The stomach begs and clamors, and listens to no precepts. And yet it is not an obdurate creditor; for it is dismissed with small payment if you give it only what you owe, and not as much as you can."
"As many servants so many enemies."
"What is required is not a lot words, but effectual ones."
"Those who pass their lives in foreign travel find they contract many ties of hospitality, but form no friendships."
"Those that are a friend to themselves are sure to be a friend to all."
"Unfamiliarity lends weight to misfortune, and there was never a man whose grief was not heightened by surprise."
"No one can wear a mask for very long."
"Crime oft recoils upon the author's head."
"Although a man has so well purged his mind that nothing can trouble or deceive him any more, yet he reached his present innocence through sin."
"Epicurus says, "gratitude is a virtue that has commonly profit annexed to it." And where is the virtue that has not? But still the virtue is to be valued for itself, and not for the profit that attends it."
"Corporeal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty."
"I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes. ... Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body."
"Nullum ad nocendum tempus angustum est malis. No time is too short for the wicked to injure their neighbors."
"Nemo tam divos habuit faventes, Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri. Nobody has ever found the gods so much his friends that he can promise himself another day."
"Plato once wanted to punish one of his slaves and asked his nephew to do the actual whipping for he himself did not own his anger."
"He that makes himself famous by his eloquence, justice or arms illustrates his extraction, let it be never so mean; and gives inestimable reputation to his parents. We should never have heard of Sophroniscus, but for his son, Socrates; nor of Ariosto and Gryllus, if it had not been for Xenophon and Plato."
"A thousand approaches lie open to death."
"The vices of idleness are only to be shaken off by active employment."