Famous Quotes

Quotes by Marcus Tullius Cicero

• Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.
• Laws are silent in time of war.
• Let us not listen to those who think we ought to be angry with our enemies, and who believe this to be great and manly. Nothing is so praiseworthy, nothing so clearly shows a great and noble soul, as clemency and readiness to forgive.
• Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law.
• Live as brave men and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.
• Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.
• Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
• Nature abhors annihilation.
• Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.
• Next to God we are nothing. To God we are Everything.
• No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.
• Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.
• Not cohabitation but consensus constitutes marriage.
• Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.
• Nothing is so strongly fortified that it cannot be taken by money.
• Of all nature's gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?
• Old age: the crown of life, our play's last act.
• Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.
• Peace is liberty in tranquillity.
• People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.
• Rashness belongs to youth prudence to old age.
• Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.
• Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
• So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.
• That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place.
• The best interpreter of the law is custom.
• The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
• The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessing previously secured.
• The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
• The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.
• The more laws, the less justice.
• The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.
• The pursuit, even of the best things, ought to be calm and tranquil.
• The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.
• The sinews of war are infinite money.
• The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.
• The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
• There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.
• This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.
• Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.