Distressed valor challenges great respect, even from an enemy.
If you light upon an impertinent talker, that sticks to you like a bur, to the disappointment of your important occasions, deal freely with him, break off the discourse, and pursue your business.
Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.
When a man’s struggle begins within oneself, the man is worth something.
Men who marry wives very much superior to themselves are not so truly husbands to their wives as they are unawares made slaves to their position.
Wisdom is neither gold, nor silver, nor fame, nor wealth, nor health, nor strength, nor beauty.
So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.
He is a fool who leaves things close at hand to follow what is out of reach.
It was not important how many enemies there are, but where the enemy is.
Rather I fear on the contrary that while we banish painful thoughts we may banish memory as well.
He who least likes courting favour, ought also least to think of resenting neglect; to feel wounded at being refused a distinction can only arise from an overweening appetite to have it.
Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
The superstitious man wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them.
Demosthenes overcame and rendered more distinct his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation by speaking with pebbles in his mouth.
Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.
Athenodorus says hydrophobia, or water-dread, was first discovered in the time of Asclepiades.
Let us not wonder if something happens which never was before, or if something doth not appear among us with which the ancients were acquainted.
Anaximander says that men were first produced in fishes, and when they were grown up and able to help themselves were thrown up, and so lived upon the land.
Pythias once, scoffing at Demosthenes, said that his arguments smelt of the lamp.
Archimedes had stated, that given the force, any given weight might be moved; and even boasted that if there were another earth, by going into it he could remove this.