Quotes by Roman Authors - Page 18

III. I have often wondered how it should come to pass, that every man loving himself best, should more regard other men's opinions concerning himself than his own. For if any God or grave master standing by, should command any of us to think nothing by himself but what he should presently speak out; no man were able to endure it, though but for one day. Thus do we fear more what our neighbours will think of us, than what we ourselves.
Marcus Aurelius
We, peopling the void air, make gods to whom we impute the ills we ought to bear.
Titus Lucretius Carus
There are many going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet they leave themselves unnoticed!
Augustine of Hippo
For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.
Marcus Aurelius
Even the least of our activities ought to have some end in view.
Marcus Aurelius
If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.
Seneca
Now I would solicit the particular attention of those numerous people who imagine that money is everything in this world, and that rank and ability are inseparable from wealth: let them observe that Cincinnatus, the one man in whom Rome reposed all her hope of survival, was at that moment working a little three-acre farm (now known as Quinctian meadows) west of the Tiber, just opposite the spot where the shipyards are today. A mission from the city found him at work on his land - digging a ditch, maybe, or ploughing. Greetings were exchanged, and he was asked - with a prayer for God's blessing on himself and his country - to put on his toga and hear the Senate's instructions. This naturally surprised him, and, asking if all were well, he told his wife Racilia to run to their cottage and fetch his toga. The toga was brought, and wiping the grimy sweat from his hands and face he put it on; at once the envoys from the city saluted him, with congratulations, as Dictator, invited him to enter Rome, and informed him of the terrible danger of Minucius's army.
Livy
He is so rich, he has no room to shit.
Marcus Aurelius
For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them
Seneca
The shortest route to wealth is the contempt of wealth.
Seneca
If you look on wealth as a thing to be valued your imaginary poverty will cause you torment.
Seneca
Oh, what darkness does great prosperity cast over our minds!
Seneca
It is the sign of a weak mind to be unable to bear wealth.
Seneca
Burning fevers flee no swifter from your body if you toss under figured counterpanes and coverlets of crimson than if you must lie in rude homespun.
Titus Lucretius Carus
Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool
Seneca
You are not the mind itself. For You are the Lord God of the mind. All these things are liable to change, but You remain immutable above all things.
Augustine of Hippo
Once you have rid yourself of the affliction there, though, every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may be banished to the ends of the earth, and yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be like, a hospitable home. Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.
Seneca
The man who spends his time choosing one resort after another in a hunt for peace and quiet will in every place he visits find something to prevent him from relaxing.
Seneca
So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honorable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting. All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re travelling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.
Seneca
All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re traveling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.
Seneca
The trip doesn’t exist that can set you beyond the reach of cravings, fits of temper, or fears … so long as you carry the sources of your troubles about with you, those troubles will continue to harass and plague you wherever you wander on land or on sea. Does it surprise you that running away doesn’t do you any good? The things you’re running away from are with you all the time.
Seneca
The world is a book, and those who don't travel only read one page.
Augustine of Hippo
If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.
Seneca
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal; and though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part, and prophesy in part.But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Saint Paul the Apostle
Among wise men there is no place at all left for hatred. For no one except the greatest of fools would hate good men. And there is no reason at all for hating the bad. For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind. And if this is so, since we think of people who are sick in body as deserving sympathy rather than hatred, much more so do they deserve pity rather than blame who suffer an evil more severe than any physical illness.
Boethius
The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.
Augustine of Hippo
But are they heroes or mere dreamers?
Gaius Valerius Flaccus
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
No one presumes to teach an art that he has not first mastered through study. How foolish therefore for the inexperienced to assume pastoral authority when the care of souls is the art of arts.
St. Gregory Dialogos
God give me patience, to reconcile with what I am not able to changeGive me strength to change what I canAnd give me wisdom to distinguish one from another.
Marcus Aurelius
Pray as though everything depends on God. And work as if everything depends on you.
Augustine of Hippo
Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.
Marcus Aurelius
As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can
Gaius Julius Caesar
I've come across people who say that there is a sort of inborn restlessness in the human spirit and an urge to change one's abode; for man is endowed with a mind which is changeable and and unsettled: nowhere at rest, it darts about and directs its thoughts to all places known and unknown, a wanderer which cannot endure repose and delights chiefly in novelty.
Seneca
You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.
Seneca
What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.
Seneca
If something is difficult for you to accomplish, do not then think it impossible for any human being; rather, if it is humanly possible and corresponds to human nature, know that it is attainable by you as well.
Marcus Aurelius
Sorrowers tend to avoid what they are most fond of and try to give vent to their grief.
Seneca
Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.
Seneca
Your laugh is of the sardonic kind.
Caius Sempronius Gracchus
Forgiveness is the remission of sins. For it is by this that what has been lost, and was found, is saved from being lost again.
Augustine of Hippo
Love the sinner and hate the sin.
Augustine of Hippo
Love sometimes injures. Friendship always benefits
Seneca
Love sometimes injures. Friendship always benefits, After friendship is formed you must trust, but before that you must judge.
Seneca
For it is one thing to see the Land of Peace from a wooded ridge, and yet another to walk the road that leads to it.
Augustine of Hippo
But perhaps there are insensitive hearts, still incapable of receiving this Light because the weight of their sins prevents them from seeing it. Let them not imagine that they Light is absent because they do not see it, for on account of their sins they are in darkness. ‘And the Light shone in the darkness, and the darkness understood it not’ (Jn 1:5). Therefore, Brothers, like the blind man exposed to the sun, the sun being present to him but he being absent from the sun, so the insensitive one, the sinner, the impious has a blind heart.
Augustine of Hippo
I little esteeme to see your visage and figure, little doe I regard the night and darknesse thereof, for you are my only light.
Apuleius
All other creatures look down toward the earth, but man was given a face so that might turn his eyes toward the stars and his gaze upon the sky.
Ovid
Right it is to be taught even by the enemy.
Ovid
How silly then to imagine that the human mind, which is formed of the same elements as divine beings, objects to movement and change of abode, while the divine nature finds delight and even self-preservation in continual and very rapid change.
Seneca
Out of Africa, there is always something new.
Pliny the Elder
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
It takes all of our life to learn how to live, and – something that may surprise you more – it takes just as long to learn how to die.
Seneca
The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.
Marcus Aurelius
Grant unto us, Lord, that we may set our hope on Thy name…and open the eyes of our hearts, that wemay know Thee.”“We beseech Thee, Lord and Master, to be our help and succour. Save those among us who are intribulation; have mercy on the lowly; lift up the fallen; show Thyself to those in need; heal the sick; turnagain the wanderers of Thy people; feed the hungry; ransom our prisoners; raise up the weak; comfortthe faint-hearted. Let all nations know that Thou art God alone, and that Jesus Christ is Thy Son, andthat we are Thy people and the sheep of Thy pasture.”“We praise Thee who art able to do these and better things than these, through Jesus Christ the HighPriest and Guardian of our souls, through whom be glory and majesty to Thee, both now andthroughout all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
Clement of Rome
One who prays ceaselessly is one who combines prayer with work and work with prayer.
Origen
He is in no real danger. He merely suffers from a lethargy, a sickness that is common among the depressed. He has forgotten who he really is, but he will recover, for he used to know me, and all I have to do is cloud the mist that beclouds his vision.
Boethius
You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.
Boethius
Words need to be sown like seeds. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when in lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size.
Seneca
There are words and accents by which this grief can be assuaged, and the disease in a great measure removed.
Horace