Quotes by Marcus Tullius Cicero

The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.

For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.

The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric.The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement.He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.

I cannot find a faithful message-bearer, he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.

Everyone has the obligation to ponder well his own specific traits of character. He must also regulate them adequately and not wonder whether someone elses traits might suit him better. The more definitely his own a mans character is, the better it fits him.

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

There is also a tradition about Socrates. He liked walking, it is recorded, until a late hour of the evening, and when someone asked him why he did this he said he was trying to work up an appetite for his dinner.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.

No power on earth, if it labours beneath the burden of fear, can possibly be strong enough to survive.

Law applied to its extreme is the greatest injustice

We are bound by the law, so that we may be free.

There are no snares more dangerous than those which lurk under the guise of duty or the name of relationship.

Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere.(No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year.)

It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.

Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.

Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage.