Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

Two distinctive traits especially identify beyond a doubt a strong and dominant character. One trait is contempt for external circumstances, when one is convinced that men ought to respect, to desire, and to pursue only what is moral and right, that men should be subject to nothing, not to another man, not to some disturbing passion, not to Fortune. The second trait, when your character has the disposition I outlined just now, is to perform the kind of services that are significant and most beneficial; but they should also be services that are a severe challenge, that are filled with ordeals, and that endanger not only your life but also the many comforts that make life attractive.Of these two traits, all the glory, magnificence, and the advantage, too, let us not forget, are in the second, while the drive and the discipline that make men great are in the former.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
We must stand up against old age and make up for its drawbacks by taking pains. We must fight it as we should an illness. We must look after our health, use moderate exercise, take just enough food and drink to recruit, but not to overload, our strength. Nor is it the body alone that must be supported, but the intellect and soul much more.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere.(No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year.)
Marcus Tullius Cicero
There are no snares more dangerous than those which lurk under the guise of duty or the name of relationship.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
We are bound by the law, so that we may be free.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Law applied to its extreme is the greatest injustice
Marcus Tullius Cicero
No power on earth, if it labours beneath the burden of fear, can possibly be strong enough to survive.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Knowledge which is divorced from justice may be called cunning rather than wisdom.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
There is also a tradition about Socrates. He liked walking, it is recorded, until a late hour of the evening, and when someone asked him why he did this he said he was trying to work up an appetite for his dinner.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Everyone has the obligation to ponder well his own specific traits of character. He must also regulate them adequately and not wonder whether someone else's traits might suit him better. The more definitely his own a man's character is, the better it fits him.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
I cannot find a faithful message-bearer," he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. "How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric.The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement.He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
What an ugly beast is the ape, and how like us.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
For walk where we will, we tread upon some story.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
An unjust peace is better than a just war.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.)
Marcus Tullius Cicero
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.)
Marcus Tullius Cicero
But if I am wrong in thinking the human soul immortal, I am glad to be wrong; nor will I allow the mistake which gives me so much pleasure to be wrested from me as long as I live.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Here is a man whose life and actions the world has already condemned - yet whose enormous fortune...has already brought him acquittal!
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
In times of war, the law falls s
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief
Marcus Tullius Cicero
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
My dear Scipio and Laelius. Men, of course, who have no resources in themselves for securing a good and happy life find every age burdensome. But those who look for all happiness from within can never think anything bad which Nature makes inevitable.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
We must not only obtain Wisdom: we must enjoy her.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
O philosophy, life's guide! O searcher-out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could we and every age of men have been without thee? Thou hast produced cities; thou hast called men scattered about into the social enjoyment of life.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
While there's life, there's hope.
Marcus Tullius Cicero