Pliny the Elder Quotes
Absentes tinnitu aurium præsentire sermones de se receptum est.
Pliny the Elder
Quotes to Explore
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In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.
Pliny the Elder
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Hardly can it be judged whether it be better for mankind to believe that the gods have regard of us, or that they have none, considering that some men have no respect and reverence for the gods, and others so much that their superstition is a shame to them.
Pliny the Elder
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Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught. He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.
Pliny the Elder
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To seek after any shape of God, and to assign a form and image to Him, is a proof of man's folly. For God, whosoever he be (if haply there be any other but the world itself), and in what part soever resident, all sense He is, all sight, all hearing: He is the whole of the life and of the soul, all of Himself.
Pliny the Elder
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The world and that which, by another name, men have thought good to call Heaven (under the compass of which all things are covered), we ought to believe, in all reason, to be a divine power, eternal, immense, without beginning, and never to perish.
Pliny the Elder
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It is ridiculous to suppose that the great head of things, whatever it be, pays any regard to human affairs.
Pliny the Elder
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Our forefathers regarded as a prodigy the passage of the Alps: first by Hannibal and, more recently, by the Cimbri; but at the present day, these very mountains are cut asunder to yield us a thousand different marbles; promontories are thrown open to the sea; and the face of Nature is being everywhere reduced to a level.
Pliny the Elder
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Cincinnatus was ploughing his four jugera of land upon the Vaticanian Hill,-the same that are still known as the Quintian Meadows,-when the messenger brought him the dictatorship, finding him, the tradition says, stripped to the work.
Pliny the Elder
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The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.
Pliny the Elder
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The human features and countenance, although composed of but some ten parts or little more, are so fashioned that among so many thousands of men there are no two in existence who cannot be distinguished from one another.
Pliny the Elder
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Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.
Pliny the Elder
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It is far from easy to determine whether she Nature has proved to man a kind parent or a merciless stepmother.
Pliny the Elder
