Quotes by Roman Authors - Page 5

When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?
Seneca
Natales grate numeras?(Do you count your birthdays with gratitude?)
Horace
To win true freeedom you must be a slave to philosophy.
Seneca
For it is one thing to see the Land of Peace from a wooded ridge, and yet another to walk the road that leads to it.
Augustine of Hippo
No one knows what he can do until he tries.
Publilius Syrus
Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise.
Horace
The gods help those who help themselves.
Marcus Terentius Varro
I am no more than a child, but my Father lives for ever and I have a Protector great enough to save me.
Augustine of Hippo
So dry your tears. Fortune has not yet turned her hatred against all your blessings. The storm has not yet broken upon you with too much violence. Your anchors are holding firm and they permit you both comfort in the present, and hope in the future.
Boethius
Certain signs precede certain events.
Cicero
...certain people have good, ordinary blood and others have an animated, lively sort of blood that comes to the face quickly.
Seneca
Hatred is settled anger.
Cicero
Old age is by nature rather talkative.
Cicero
The world is a book, and those who don't travel only read one page.
Augustine of Hippo
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
Publilius Syrus
All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant, useful to the politician, and ridiculous to the philosopher.
Titus Lucretius Carus
Where they make a desert they call it peace.
Tacitus
Forgive others often yourself never.
Syrus
Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
The good things that belong to prosperity are to be wished but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
O philosophy, life's guide! O searcher-out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could we and every age of men have been without thee? Thou hast produced cities; thou hast called men scattered about into the social enjoyment of life.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
How good it is, when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this the dead body of a bird or pig.
Marcus Aurelius
There are words and accents by which this grief can be assuaged, and the disease in a great measure removed.
Horace
If we let things terrify us life will not be worth living.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca
There is no man so blessed that some who stand by his deathbed won't hail the occasion with delight.
Marcus Aurelius
To stumble twice against the same stone is a proverbial disgrace.
Cicero
they Whatever can make life truly happy is absolutely good in its own right because it cannot be warped into evil From whence then comes error In that while all men wish for a happy life they mistake the means for the thing itself and while they fancy themselves in pursuit of it they are flying from it for when the sum of happiness consists in solid tranquillity and an unembarrassed confidence therein they are ever collecting causes of disquiet and not only carry burthens but drag them painfully along through the rugged and deceitful path of life so that they still withdraw themselves from the good effect proposed the more pains they take the more business they have upon their hands instead of advancing they are retrograde and as it happens in a labyrinth their very speed puzzles and confounds them
Seneca
The flocks fear the wolf the crops the storm and the trees the wind.
Virgil
Everyone ought to bear patiently the results of his own conduct.
Phaedrus
The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.
Marcus Aurelius
Lectio, quae placuit, decies repetita placebit.(What we read with pleasure we can read many times with pleasure.)
Horace
Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a waking man.
Pliny the Elder
At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty4 to the republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.
Augustus
While there's life there's hope.
Terence
Take full account of the excellencies which you possess and in gratitude remember how you would hanker after them if you had them not.
Marcus Aurelius
If you have two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you and the other to the man with no shirt.
Ambrose of Milan
After I am dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
Marcus Porcius Cato
There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.
Pliny
I little esteeme to see your visage and figure, little doe I regard the night and darknesse thereof, for you are my only light.
Apuleius
There is no murky pit of hell awaiting anyone ... Mind cannot arise alone without body, or apart from sinews and blood ... You must admit, therefore, that when then body has perished, there is an end also of the spirit diffused through it. It is surely crazy to couple a mortal object with an eternal...
Titus Lucretius Carus
Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.
Plautus
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
Marcus Aurelius
For you [God] are infinite and never change. In you 'today' never comes to an end: and yet our 'today' does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply 'today'...But you yourself are eternally the same. In your 'today' you will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in your 'today' you have made all that existed yesterday and for ever before.
Augustine of Hippo
What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.
Seneca
Nothing can dwindle to nothing, as Nature restores one thing from the stuff of another, nor does she allow a birth, without a corresponding death.
Titus Lucretius Carus
And may I live the remainder of my life ... for myself may there be plenty of books and many years' store of the fruits of the earth!
Horace
Purity both of the body and the soul rests on the steadfastness of the will strengthened by God's grace, and cannot be forcibly taken from an unwilling person.
Augustine of Hippo
But are they heroes or mere dreamers?
Gaius Valerius Flaccus
The part of life we really live is small.' For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.
Seneca
In my deepest wound I saw your glory, and it dazzled me.
Augustine of Hippo
This is pride when the soul abandons Him to Whom it ought to cleave as its end and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction.
Augustine of Hippo
it is a higher glory... to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war.
Augustine of Hippo
Let your poem be kept nine years.
Horace
Most powerful is he who has himself in his power.
Seneca
Love and do what you like.
St. Augustine
Live out your life in truth and justice, tolerant of those who are neither true nor just.
Marcus Aurelius
I was still unteachable, being inflated with the novelty of heresy.
Augustine of Hippo
For Fate/ The willing leads, the unwilling drags along.
Seneca
What it is forbidden to be put right becomes lighter by acceptance.
Horace