Top 100 Quotes About Cicero
#2. Another of Cicero's maxims was that if you must do something unpopular, you might as well do it wholeheartedly, for in politics there is no credit to be won by timidity.
Robert Harris
#3. I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.
Augustine Of Hippo
#4. Cicero's words also increased my personal satisfaction by supporting my long-standing rejection of a conventional point of view.
Charlie Munger
#5. What Cicero said of men-that they are like wines, age souring the bad, and bettering the good-we can say of misfortune, that it has the same effect upon them.
Jean Paul
#6. The sword must yield to the toga, Cicero had told the Roman Senate, and the friars in the Philippines thought a cassock was as good as a toga. But
Jose Rizal
#7. There is no power like oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears, Cicero by ... swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished; that of the other continues to this day.
Henry Clay
#8. Everything is indefinite, misty, and transient; only virtue is clear, and it cannot be destroyed by any force. - MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO
Leo Tolstoy
#9. But as Cicero had long tried to convince him, a speech is a performance, not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect
Robert Harris
#11. Let - not - your - heart - be - troubled. In - my - Father's - house - are - many - mansions. I - go - to - prepare - a - place - for - you." Cicero,
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#12. Eloquence which does not startle I don't consider eloquence. CICERO, LETTER TO BRUTUS, 48 B.C.
Robert Harris
#13. If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero's speeches are language as practical tool.
Thomas Cahill
#14. Abstain from beans. There be sundry interpretations of this symbol. But Plutarch and Cicero think beans to be forbidden of Pythagoras, because they be windy and do engender impure humours and for that cause provoke bodily lust.
Richard Taverner
#15. The people, as Cicero says, may be ignorant, but they can recognize the truth and will readily yield when some trustworthy man explains it to them.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#16. Cicero himself appeared, hand in hand with Tullia, nodding good morning to everyone, greeting each by name ("the first rule in politics, Tiro: never forget a face").
Robert Harris
#17. Don't be snowed by a handsome guy at a bookstore who quotes Cicero and Proust. They are often not the real thing. As with many fleeting pleasures
travel in their company, enjoy them every so often, and then get on with your life.
Jennifer Kaufman
#18. Cicero calls gratitude the mother of virtues the most capital of all duties, and uses the words grateful and good as synonymous terms, inseparably united in the same character.
Julius Bate
#19. Cicero said that gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others. If that's true, then my happiness does not cause me to be grateful for what I have. My gratitude for what I have causes me to be happy. Gratitude births the virtue of happiness.
Jennifer Dukes Lee
#20. As Cicero would later declare, 'For what is the life of a man, if it is not interwoven with the life of former generations by a sense of history?"3
Adrian Goldsworthy
#21. Do you remember that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, "How well he spoke" but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, "Let us march.
Demosthenes
#22. As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.
Jostein Gaarder
#23. To live without having a Cicero and a Tacitus at hand seems to me as if it was aprivation of one of my limbs.
John Quincy Adams
#24. In the usual course of study I had come to a book of a certain Cicero.
Saint Augustine
#25. I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.
Seth Shostak
#26. (I)t was by Cicero's attainments that that he'd gained special witness to the liberals' adjustment to a brush with actual equality.
Jonathan Lethem
#27. Lucretius and Cicero testify to the view that people dream about the things that concern them in waking life.
Sigmund Freud
#28. 433. - The most certain sign of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy. ["Nemo alienae virtuti invidet qui satis confidet suae." - Cicero In Marc Ant.]
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#29. I have been ... moved to wonder whether my job is a job or a racket, whether economists, and particularly economic theorists, may not be in the position that Cicero, citing Cato, ascribed to the augurs of Rome-that they should cover their faces or burst into laugher when they met on the street.
Frank Knight
#30. Cicero said that even if his lifetime were to be doubled he would still not have time to waste on reading the lyric poets.
Edward Hirsch
#31. Cicero had lived through terrible times and his fundamental aim was to make sure that they never returned. He stood for the rule of law and the maintenance of a constitution in which all social groups could play a part, but where the Senate took the lead according to ancestral tradition.
Anthony Everitt
#32. The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.
Ilana Mercer
#33. The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible
William Blake
#34. Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. - Marcus Tullius Cicero
Tom Standage
#36. Throw that dreary man Cicero out of the window, and request the divine Virgil (with the utmost love and respect) to take a seat along with his fellow-Augustans and the First Consul, until your pupils are ready to be ushered into the presence.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#37. He [William Harvey] bid me to goe to the Fountain-head, and read Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna, and did call the Neoteriques shitt-breeches.
John Aubrey
#38. The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero once said: 'Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
Ha-Joon Chang
#39. Either the future is subject to chance
in which case nobody, not even a god, can affect it one way or the other
or it is predestined, in which case foreknowledge cannot avert it.
Quintus Tullius Cicero
Anthony Everitt
#40. Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.
Gustave Flaubert
#41. I would not live over my hours past ... not unto Cicero's ground because I have lived them well, but for fear I should live them worse.
Thomas Browne
#42. Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.
Plutarch
#43. Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.
Robert Harris
#44. In the face of a true friend a man sees, as it were, a second self. - CICERO, De Amicitia I
Anne Fortier
#45. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#46. The accepted etymology of the word religion was that it came from religere, meaning "to bind together," but Cicero had said its true root was relegere, "to reread." The truth was, she liked both answers.
James S.A. Corey
#47. That silence is one of the great arts of conversation is allowed by Cicero himself, who says, there is not only an art, but even an eloquence in it
Hannah More
#48. Laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing! It is the jester! A voice from the Void, to cheer poor Cicero! I accept your gift, dearest Night Mother. Thank you for my laughter. Thank you for my friend.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#49. History of science is a relay race, my painter friend. Copernicus took over his flag from Aristarchus, from Cicero, from Plutarch; and Galileo took that flag over from Copernicus.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#50. from Cicero: "To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain a child always.
John Lukacs
#51. Lincoln was not an intellectual, but no one in 200 years understood the language of the King James Bible or learned Blackstone's Laws of England, or Cicero, or the language of the Founding Fathers, better than he did.
Michael Ignatieff
#52. Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.
Plutarch
#53. For what is the life of a man, if it is not interwoven with the life of former generations by as sense of history. [Cicero, quoted by Goldsworthy in his Augustus]
Adrian Goldsworthy
#54. Cicero said: "Not to have a mania for buying, is to possess a revenue." Many are carried away by the habit of bargain-buying. "Here's something wonderfully cheap; let's buy it." "Have you any use for it?" "No, not at present; but it is sure to come in useful, some time.
Orison Swett Marden
#55. Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors. He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.
David Markson
#56. Victories in the field count for little if the right decisions are not taken at home (45) - Cicero
Anthony Everitt
#57. Cicero, in his treatise concerning the Nature of the Gods, having said that three Jupiters were enumerated by theologians, adds that the third was of Crete, the son of Saturn, and that his tomb is shown in that island.
Lactantius
#58. Princeton applicants had to know Virgil, Cicero's orations, and Latin grammar and also had to be 'so well acquainted with Greek as to render any part of the four Evangelists in that language into Latin or English.
Ron Chernow
#59. It is observed by Cicero, that men of the greatest and most shining parts are most actuated by ambition.
Joseph Addison
#60. Who does not more admire Cicero as an author than as a consul of Rome?
Joseph Addison
#61. After the battle in Pharsalia, when Pompey was fled, one Nonius said they had seven eagles left still, and advised to try what they would do. "Your advice," said Cicero, "were good if we were to fight jackdaws.
Plutarch
#62. If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero.
Voltaire
#63. As I continued through Cicero's pages, I found much more material celebrating my way of life ...
Charlie Munger
#64. Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man.
Thomas Hobbes
#65. The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rime or to Great Britain; Boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliament.
Noah Webster
#66. Cicero smiled at us. 'The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.
Robert Harris
#67. Men may construe things, after their fashion / Clean them from the purpose of the things themselves
-Cicero
William Shakespeare
#69. Cicero was nothing if not a genius at character assassination.
Anthony Everitt
#70. For most people bedtime was early, although Cicero admitted to writing speeches or books and reading papers at night (there was a Latin word for it, lucubrare - to work by lamplight).
Anthony Everitt
#72. For as I like a man in whom there is something of the old, so I like a man in whom there is something of the young; and he who follows this maxim, in body will possibly be an old man but he will never be an old man in mind.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#75. It is difficult to persuade mankind that the love of virtue is the love of themselves.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#77. No liberal man would impute a charge of unsteadiness to another for having changed his opinion.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#78. The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself is beneficial, but there is a great difference between peace and servitude. Peace is freedom in tranquillity, servitude is the worst of all evils, to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#79. The counsels of the Divine Mind had some glimpse of truth when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty for sins committed in a former life.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#83. For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#84. Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#86. There is no quality I would rather have, and be thought to have, than gratitude. For it is not only the greatest virtue, but is the mother of all the rest.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#87. That is probable which for the most part usually comes to pass, or which is a part of the ordinary beliefs of mankind.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#88. People always thought if no one believed in God and we were nihilists then people would go around murdering each other. That didn't happen at all, we just bought a lot of things with credit.
Noah Cicero
#94. There is nothing better fitted to delight the reader than change of circumstances and varieties of fortune.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#97. There is a difference between justice and consideration in one's relations to one's fellow men. It is the function of justice not to do wrong to one's fellow men of considerateness, not to wound their feelings.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#99. The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#100. When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
