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Quotes by Roman Authors
"The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ."
"How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity."
"The sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment."
"Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart?"
"The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle."
"It is a higher glory... to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war."
"If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself."
"He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule."
"One crime has to be concealed by another."
"O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!"
"There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with."
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
"Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already."
"Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, "This is a misfortune" but "To bear this worthily is good fortune.""
"He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason."
"All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion."
"Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times."
"There is nothing that is more often clothed in an attractive garb than a false creed."
"A man must stand erect, not be kept erect by others."
"How closely flattery resembles friendship! It not only apes friendship, but outdoes it, passing it in the race; with wide-open and indulgent ears it is welcomed and sinks to the depths of the heart, and it is pleasing precisely wherein it does harm."
"The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired."
"There could be nothing more fortunate for human affairs than that by the mercy of God they who are endowed with true piety of life if they have the skill for ruling people should also have the power."
"Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men."
"Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?"
"You are not blamed for your unwilling ignorance, but because you fail to ask about what you do not know.... For no one is prevented from leaving behind the disadvantage of ignorance and seeking the advantage of knowledge."
"Yet we must say something when those who say the most are saying nothing."
"For it is one thing to see the Land of Peace from a wooded ridge, and yet another to walk the road that leads to it."
"We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that."
"Do not feel surprise at being schooled amid toil: you are being schooled for a wondrous destiny."
"He that becomes protector of sin shall surely become its prisoner."
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