Sallust Quotes
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Before you act, consider; when you have considered, tis fully time to act.
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Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.
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Neither soldiers nor money can defend a king but only friends won by good deeds, merit, and honesty.
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For harmony makes small states great, while discord undermines the mightiest empires.
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He only seems to me to live, and to make proper use of life, who sets himself some serious work to do, and seeks the credit of a task well and skillfully performed.
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Greedy for the property of others, extravagant with his own.
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It is a law of human nature that in victory even the coward may boast of his prowess, while defeat injures the reputation even of the brave.
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He that will be angry for anything will be angry for nothing.
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Deliberate before you begin; but, having carefully done so, execute with vigour.
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It is sweet to surve one country by deeds, and it is not absurd to surve her by words.
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Get good counsel before you begin; and when you have decided, act promptly.
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One can ever assume to be what he is not, and to conceal what he is.
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There were few who preferred honor to money.
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All persons who are enthusiastic that they should transcend the other animals ought to strive with the utmost effort not to pass through a life of silence, like cattle, which nature has fashioned to be prone and obedient to their stomachs.
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While the body is young and fine, the soul blunders, but as the body grows old it attains its highest power. Again, every good soul uses mind; but no body can produce mind: for how should that which is without mind produce mind? Again, while the soul uses the body as an instrument, it is not in it; just as the engineer is not in his engines (although many engines move without being touched by any one).
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Poor Britons, there is some good in them after all - they produced an oyster.
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It is not unlikely, too, that the rejection of God is a kind of punishment: we may well believe that those who knew the Gods and neglected them in one life may in another life be deprived of the knowledge of them altogether. Also those who have worshipped their own kings as gods have deserved as their punishment to lose all knowledge of God.
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In victory even the cowardly like to boast, while in adverse times even the brave are discredited.
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Souls are punished when they have gone forth from the body, some wandering among us, some going to hot or cold places of the earth, some harassed by spirits. Under all circumstances they suffer with the irrational part of their nature, with which they also sinned. For its sake there subsists that shadowy body which is seen about graves, especially the graves of evil livers.
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But at power or wealth, for the sake of which wars, and all kinds of strife, arise among mankind, we do not aim; we desire only our liberty, which no honorable man relinquishes but with his life.
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Necessitas etiam timidos fortes facit.
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Everything destroyed is either resolved into the elements from which it came, or else vanishes into not-being. If things are resolved into the elements from which they came, then there will be others: else how did they come into being at all?
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If fortune makes a wicked man prosperous and a good man poor, there is no need to wonder. For the wicked regard wealth as everything, the good as nothing. And the good fortune of the bad cannot take away their badness, while virtue alone will be enough for the good.
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Now the myths represent the Gods themselves and the goodness of the Gods subject always to the distinction of the speakable and the unspeakable, the revealed and the unrevealed, that which is clear and that which is hidden: since, just as the Gods have made the goods of sense common to all, but those of intellect only to the wise, so the myths state the existence of Gods to all, but who and what they are only to those who can understand.