Plutarch Quotes
-
As in the case of painters, who have undertaken to give us a beautiful and graceful figure, which may have some slight blemishes, we do not wish then to pass over such blemishes altogether, nor yet to mark them too prominently. The one would spoil the beauty, and the other destroy the likeness of the picture.
-
He said that in his whole life he most repented of three things: one was that he had trusted a secret to a woman; another, that he went by water when he might have gone by land; the third, that he had remained one whole day without doing any business of moment.
-
Courage and wisdom are, indeed, rarities amongst men, but of all that is good, a just man it would seem is the most scarce.
-
Democritus said, words are but the shadows of actions.
-
Like the man who threw a stone at a bitch, but hit his step-mother, on which he exclaimed, 'Not so bad!'
-
When a man's struggle begins within oneself, the man is worth something.
-
Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: 'Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one?'
-
He that first started that doctrine, that knavery is the best defense against a knave, was but an ill teacher, advising us to commit wickedness to secure ourselves.
-
I confess myself the greatest coward in the world, for I dare not do an ill thing.
-
A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, 'Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?' holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. 'Yet,' added he, 'none of you can tell where it pinches me.'
-
I am whatever was, or is, or will be; and my veil no mortal ever took up.
-
Said Periander, 'Hesiod might as well have kept his breath to cool his pottage.'
-
The pilot cannot mitigate the billows or calm the winds.
-
Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.
-
The talkative listen to no one, for they are ever speaking. And the first evil that attends those who know not to be silent is that they hear nothing.
-
Cæsar said to the soothsayer, 'The ides of March are come;' who answered him calmly, 'Yes, they are come, but they are not past.'
-
Epaminondas is reported wittily to have said of a good man that died about the time of the battle of Leuctra, 'How came he to have so much leisure as to die, when there was so much stirring?'
-
Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.
-
Nor is drunkenness censured for anything so much as its intemperate and endless talk.
-
Custom is almost a second nature.
-
Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face, where the character is revealed, than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men.
-
Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns; for, ion ceasing to be numbered with mortals, he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life. Since he is gone where he feels no pain, let us not indulge in too much grief. The soul is incapable of death. And he, like a bird not long enough in his cage to become attached to it, is free to fly away to a purer air. . . . Since we cherish a trust like this, let our outward actions be in accord with it, and let us keep our hearts pure and our minds calm.
-
For the rich men without scruple drew the estate into their own hands, excluding the rightful heirs from their succession; and all the wealth being centred upon the few, the generality were poor and miserable. Honourable pursuits, for which there was no longer leisure, were neglected; the state was filled with sordid business, and with hatred and envy of the rich.
-
Memory: what wonders it performs in preserving and storing up things gone by - or rather, things that are.