Everyone cleaves to the doctrine he has happened upon, as to a rock against which he has been thrown by tempest.
A good man will not lie, although it be for his profit.
Wisdom is the only thing which can relieve us from the sway of the passions and the fear of danger, and which can teach us to bear the injuries of fortune itself with moderation, and which shows us all the ways which lead to tranquility and peace.
What times! What manners!
For what is there more hideous than avarice, more brutal than lust, more contemptible than cowardice, more base than stupidity and folly?
That, Senators, is what a favour from gangs amounts to. They refrain from murdering someone; then they boast that they have spared him!
Can you also, Lucullus, affirm that there is any power united with wisdom and prudence which has made, or, to use your own expression, manufactured man? What sort of a manufacture is that? Where is it exercised? when? why? how?
The world has not yet learned the riches of frugality.
Probabilities direct the conduct of the wise man.
A s laws multiply, injustice increases.
I know that it is likely that as worship of the gods declines, faith between men and all human society will disappear, as well as that most excellent of all virtues, which is justice.
Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason that he is a man.
To reduce man to the duties of his own city, and to disengage him from duties to the members of other cities, is to break the universal society of the human race.
I will go further, and assert that nature without culture can often do more to deserve praise than culture without nature.
Fortune is not only blind herself, but blinds the people she has embraced.
The whole glory of virtue resides in activity.
The soul in sleep gives proof of its divine nature.
Quacks pretend to cure other men’s disorders, but fail to find a remedy for their own.
It is a strong proof of men knowing most things before birth, that when mere children they grasp innumerable facts with such speed as to show that they are not then taking them in for the first time, but are remembering and recalling them.
Religion is the pious worship of God.