Plutarch Quotes
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Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors.
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Socrates... said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
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Pythias once, scoffing at Demosthenes, said that his arguments smelt of the lamp.
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Children are to be won to follow liberal studies by exhortations and rational motives, and on no account to be forced thereto by whipping.
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To the Greeks, the supreme function of music was to "praise the gods and educate the youth". In Egypt... Initiatory music was heard only in Temple rites because it carried the vibratory rhythms of other worlds and of a life beyond the mortal.
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When one asked him what boys should learn, 'That,' said he, 'which they shall use when men.'
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It is wise to be silent when occasion requires, and better than to speak, though never so well.
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After he routed Pharnaces Ponticus at the first assault, he wrote thus to his friends: 'I came, I saw, I conquered.'
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Memory: what wonders it performs in preserving and storing up things gone by - or rather, things that are.
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Oh, what a world full of pain we create, for a little taste upon the tongue.
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In human life there is constant change of fortune; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate. Life itself decays, and all things are daily changing.
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God is the brave man's hope, and not the coward's excuse.
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Are you not ashamed to mix tame fruits with blood and slaughter? You are indeed wont to call serpents, leopards, and lions savage creatures; but yet yourselves are defiled with blood, and come nothing behind them in cruelty. What they kill is their ordinary nourishment, but what you kill is your better fare.
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He (Cato) never gave his opinion in the Senate upon any other point whatever, without adding these words, "And, in my opinion Carthage should be destroyed." ["Delenda est Carthago."]
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He who cheats with an oath acknowledges that he is afraid of his enemy, but that he thinks little of God.
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Nothing made the horse so fat as the king's eye.
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Themistocles said that he certainly could not make use of any stringed instrument; could only, were a small and obscure city put into his hands, make it great and glorious.
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Painting is silent poetry.
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The superstitious man wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them.
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What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
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It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
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Philosophy finds talkativeness a disease very difficult and hard to cure. For its remedy, conversation, requires hearers: but talkative people hear nobody, for they are ever prating. And the first evil this inability to keep silence produces is an inability to listen.
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There were two brothers called Both and Either; perceiving Either was a good, understanding, busy fellow, and Both a silly fellow and good for little, Philip said, 'Either is both, and Both is neither.'
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If you hate your enemies, you will contract such a vicious habit of mind that it will break out upon those who are your friends, or those who are indifferent to you.