Plutarch Quotes
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To one that promised to give him hardy cocks that would die fighting, 'Prithee,' said Cleomenes, 'give me cocks that will kill fighting.'
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Pythias once, scoffing at Demosthenes, said that his arguments smelt of the lamp.
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Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors.
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Anger turns the mind out of doors and bolts the entrance.
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Oh, what a world full of pain we create, for a little taste upon the tongue.
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Painting is silent poetry.
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Nor is drunkenness censured for anything so much as its intemperate and endless talk.
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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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When a man's struggle begins within oneself, the man is worth something.
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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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Themistocles being asked whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer, said, 'Which would you rather be,-a conqueror in the Olympic games, or the crier that proclaims who are conquerors?'
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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'You speak truth,' said Themistocles; 'I should never have been famous if I had been of Seriphus; nor you, had you been of Athens'.
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Rather I fear on the contrary that while we banish painful thoughts we may banish memory as well.
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Nothing made the horse so fat as the king's eye.
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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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When a man's eyes are sore his friends do not let him finger them, however much he wishes to, nor do they themselves touch the inflammation: But a man sunk in grief suffers every chance comer to stir and augment his affliction like a running sore; and by reason of the fingering and consequent irritation it hardens into a serious and intractable evil.