Plutarch Quotes
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It is a true proverb, that if you live with a lame man, you will learn to limp.
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Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed that one is adversity.
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Time is the wisest of all counselors.
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It is easy to utter what has been kept silent, but impossible to recall what has been uttered.
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The new king [Alexander the Great] should perform acts so important and glorious as would make the poets and musicians of future ages labour and sweat to describe and celebrate him.
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He [Caesar] loved the treason, but hated the traitor.
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Blinded as they are to their true character by self-love, every man is his own first and chiefest flatterer, prepared, therefore, to welcome the flatterer from the outside, who only comes confirming the verdict of the flatterer within.
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Where the lion's skin will not reach, you must patch it out with the fox's.
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A good man will take care of his horses and dogs, not only while they are young, but when old and past service.
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Politics is not like an ocean voyage or a military campaign... something which leaves off as soon as reached. It is not a public chore to be gotten over with. It is a way of life.
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The authors of great evils know best how to remove them.
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Come back with your shield - or on it.
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This excerpt is presented as reproduced by Copernicus in the preface to De Revolutionibus: "Some think that the earth remains at rest. But Philolaus the Pythagorean believes that, like the sun and moon, it revolves around the fire in an oblique circle. Heraclides of Pontus and Ecphantus the Pythagorean make the earth move, not in a progressive motion, but like a wheel in rotation from west to east around its own center."
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We rich men count our felicity and happiness to lie in these superfluities, and not in those necessary things.
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Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
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Said Scopas of Thessaly, 'We rich men count our felicity and happiness to lie in these superfluities, and not in those necessary things.'
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The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
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Themistocles replied that a man's discourse was like to a rich Persian carpet, the beautiful figures and patterns of which can only be shown by spreading and extending it out; when it is contracted and folded up, they are obscured and lost.
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They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life. It is the life of a domesticated political and social creature who is born with a love for public life, with a desire for honor, with a feeling for his fellows; and it lasts as long as need be.
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It is not reasonable that he who does not shoot should hit the mark, nor that he who does not stand fast at his post should win the day, or that the helpless man should succeed or the coward prosper.
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Silence is an answer to a wise man.
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The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length.
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Foreign lady once remarked to the wife of a Spartan commander that the women of Sparta were the only women in the world who could rule men. "We are the only women who raise men," the Spartan lady replied.
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'These Macedonians,' said he, 'are a rude and clownish people, that call a spade a spade.'