Boethius Quotes

#1. Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.

Boethius

#2. Nunc fluens facit tempus,
nunc stans facit aeternitatum.
(The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity.)

Boethius

#3. And no renown can render you well-known:
For if you think that fame can lengthen life
By mortal famousness immortalized,
The day will come that takes your fame as well,
And there a second death for you awaits.

Boethius

#4. Whose happiness is so firmly established that he has no quarrel from any side with his estate of life?

Boethius

#5. A person is an individual substance of a rational nature.

Boethius

#6. If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy

Boethius

#7. Love has three kinds of origin, namely: suffering, friendship and love. A human love has a corporal and intellectual origin.

Boethius

#8. There is no danger: he is suffering from drowsiness, that disease which attacks so many minds which have been deceived.

Boethius

#9. In other living creatures ignorance of self is nature; in man it is vice.

Boethius

#10. I scarcely know the meaning of your question; much less can I answer it.

Boethius

#11. So dry your tears. Fortune has not yet turned her hatred against all your blessings. The storm has not yet broken upon you with too much violence. Your anchors are holding firm and they permit you both comfort in the present, and hope in the future.

Boethius

#12. We cannot raise the question: How can there be evil if God exists? without raising the second: How can there be good if He exists not?

Boethius

#13. 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

#14. Verily this is the very crown of my misfortunes, that men's opinions for the most part look not to real merit, but to the event; and only recognise foresight where Fortune has crowned the issue with her approval.

Boethius

#15. As far as possible, join faith to reason.

Boethius

#16. Indeed, the condition of human nature is just this; man towers above the rest of creation so long as he realizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man it is a defect.

Boethius

#17. Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.

Boethius

#18. The greatest misery in adverse fortune is once to have been happy.

Boethius

#19. Human perversity, then, makes divisions of that which by nature is one and simple, and in attempting to obtain part of something which has no parts, succeeds in getting neither the part- which is nothing- nor the whole, which they are not interested in.

Boethius

#20. Love binds people too, in matrimony's sacred bonds where chaste lovers are met, and friends cement their trust and friendship. How happy is mankind, if the love that orders the stars above rules, too, in your hearts.

Boethius

#21. A man content to go to heaven alone will never go to heaven.

Boethius

#22. But by the same logic as men become just through the possession of justice, or wise through the possession of wisdom, so those who possess divinity necessary become divine. Each happy individual is therefore divine. While only God is so by nature, as many as you like may become so by participation.

Boethius

#23. One's virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune.

Boethius

#24. With chaste affections man and wife In solemn wedlock it entwines. Love's laws most trusty comrades bind. How happy is the human race, 30 If Love, by which the heavens are ruled, To rule men's minds is set in place!

Boethius

#25. If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?

Boethius

#26. Nothing is miserable but what is thought so, and contrariwise, every estate is happy if he that bears it be content.

Boethius

#27. Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.

Boethius

#28. Good men seek it by the natural means of the virtues; evil men, however, try to achieve the same goal by a variety of concupiscences, and that is surely an unnatural way of seeking the good. Don't you agree?

Boethius

#29. The good is the end toward which all things tend.

Boethius

#30. Man is so constituted that he then only excels other things when he knows himself.

Boethius

#31. Give me Thy light, and fix my eyes on Thee!

Boethius

#32. The science of numbers ought to be preferred as an acquisition before all others, because of its necessity and because of the great secrets and other mysteries which there are in the properties of numbers. All sciences partake of it, and it has need of none.

Boethius

#33. In every kind of adversity, the bitterest part of a man's affliction is to remember that he once was happy.

Boethius

#34. Contemplate the extent and stability of the heavens, and then at last cease to admire worthless things.

Boethius

#35. Inconsistency is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top

Boethius

#36. Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it - even if we so desired.

Boethius

#37. Every man must be content with that glory which he may have at home.

Boethius

#38. So nothing is ever good or bad unless you think it so, and vice versa. All luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.

Boethius

#39. And it is because you don't know the end and purpose of things that you think the wicked and the criminal have power and happiness.

Boethius

#40. If happiness is the highest good of a rational nature, and if what can be taken from you in any way cannot be the highest (for what cannot be taken away ranks higher than what can), it is obvious that the fluidity of Fortune cannot hope to win happiness. 24

Boethius

#41. All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just.

Boethius

#42. Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like drunk men, know not the road home.

Boethius

#43. In omni adversitate fortunae, infelicissimum genus est infortunii fuisse felicem In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune.

Boethius

#44. No man is rich who shakes and groans
Convinced that he needs more.

Boethius

#45. Has the world become so topsy-turvy that a living creature, whom the gift of reason makes divine, believes that his glory lies solely in possession of lifeless goods?

Boethius

#46. Your mind is likewise blocked. But the right road awaits you still. Cast out your doubts, your fears and your desires, let go of grief and of hope as well, for where these rule the mind is their subject.

Boethius

#47. He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate ... can look fortune in the face.

Boethius

#48. For in all adversity of fortune the worst sort of misery is to have been happy.

Boethius

#49. Thou knowest that these things which I say are true, and that I was never delighted in my own praise, for the secret of a good conscience is in some sort diminished, when by declaring what he hath done, a man receiveth the reward of fame.

Boethius

#50. You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.

Boethius

#51. He who is virtuous is wise; and he who is wise is good; and he who is good is happy.

Boethius

#52. In other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is a vice.

Boethius

#53. The completely simultaneous and perfect possession of
unlimited life at a single moment.

Boethius