I like myself, but I won’t say I’m as handsome as the bull that kidnapped Europa.
For what people have always sought is equality before the law. For rights that were not open to all alike would be no rights.
Yield, ye arms, to the toga; to civic praise, ye laurels.
A war is never undertaken by the ideal State, except in defense of its honor or its safety.
There is nothing more shocking than to see assertion and approval dashing ahead of cognition and perception.
It is not the place that maketh the person, but the person that maketh the place honorable.
We all are imbued with the love of praise.
To wonder at nothing when it happens, to consider nothing impossible before it has come to pass.
Man’s life is ruled by fortune, not by wisdom.
Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.
The well-known old remark of Cato, who used to wonder how two soothsayers could look one another in the face without laughing.
For a courageous man cannot die dishonorably, a man who has attained the consulship cannot die before his time, a philosopher cannot die wretchedly.
Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable, nothing so rough and uncultured as not to gain brilliance and refinement from eloquence.
The gods attend to great matters, they neglect small ones.
This seems to be advanced as the surest basis for our belief in the existence of gods, that there is no race so uncivilized, no one in the world so barbarous that his mind has no inkling of a belief in gods.
What is impossible by the nature of things is not confirmed by any law.
An innocent man, if accused, can be acquitted; a guilty man, unless accused, cannot be condemned. It is, however, more advantageous to absolve an innocent than not to prosecute a guilty man.
We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.
I remember the very thing that I do not wish to; I cannot forget the things I wish to forget.
Peace is so beneficial that the word itself is pleasant to hear.