Plutarch Quotes
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Water continually dropping will wear hard rocks hollow.
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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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Painting is silent poetry.
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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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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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What can they suffer that do not fear to die?
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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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When malice is joined to envy, there is given forth poisonous and feculent matter, as ink from the cuttle-fish.
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But the Lacedaemonians, who make it their first principle of action to serve their country's interest, know not any thing to be just or unjust by any measure but that.
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The generous mind adds dignity to every act, and nothing misbecomes it.
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Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funeral of a good man, but by hymns, for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals he enters upon the heritage of a diviner life.
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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.
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When another is asked a question, take special care not to interrupt to answer it yourself.
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Apothegms are the most infallible mirror to represent a man truly what he is.
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Immoderate grief is selfish, harmful, brings no advantage to either the mourner or the mourned, and dishonors the dead.
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Nature without learning is like a blind man; learning without Nature, like a maimed one; practice without both, incomplete. As in agriculture a good soil is first sought for, then a skilful husbandman, and then good seed; in the same way nature corresponds to the soil, the teacher to the husbandman, precepts and instruction to the seed.
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Distressed valor challenges great respect, even from an enemy.
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A remorseful change of mind renders even a noble action base, whereas the determination which is grounded on knowledge and reason cannot change even if its actions fail.
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The usual disease of princes, grasping covetousness, had made them suspicious and quarrelsome neighbors.
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For ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting solidity or exactness of beauty.
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If any man think it a small matter, or of mean concernment, to bridle his tongue, he is much mistaken; for it is a point to be silent when occasion requires, and better than to speak, though never so well.
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Oh, what a world full of pain we create, for a little taste upon the tongue.
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A Locanian having plucked all the feathers off from a nightingale and seeing what a little body it had, "surely," quoth he, "thou art all voice and nothing else.
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Cato the elder wondered how that city was preserved wherein a fish was sold for more than an ox.