Quotes By Marcus Tullius Cicero

What gift has providence bestowed on man that is so dear to him as his children?

What sweetness is left in life, if you take away friendship? Robbing life of friendship is like robbing the world of the sun. A true friend is more to be esteemed than kinsfolk.

All pain is either severe or slight, if slight, it is easily endured; if severe, it will without doubt be brief.

What is permissible is not always honorable.

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due.

Just as the soul fills the body, so God fills the world. Just as the soul bears the body, so God endures the world. Just as the soul sees but is not seen, so God sees but is not seen. Just as the soul feeds the body, so God gives food to the world.

The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.

Take from a man his reputation for probity, and the more shrewd and clever he is, the more hated and mistrusted he becomes.

Of all nature's gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

Like associates with like.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.

The best interpreter of the law is custom.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it.

Nothing is so strongly fortified that it cannot be taken by money.

A tear dries quickly when it is shed for troubles of others.

Not cohabitation but consensus constitutes marriage.

Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

As fire when thrown into water is cooled down and put out, so also a false accusation when brought against a man of the purest and holiest character, boils over and is at once dissipated, and vanishes and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing unmoved.

Confidence is that feeling by which the mind embarks in great and honorable courses with a sure hope and trust in itself.

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

Before beginning, plan carefully.

What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.