Quotes from Marcus Tullius Cicero

Here is a man whose life and actions the world has already condemned - yet whose enormous fortune...has already brought him acquittal!

The closer the collapse of the Empire, the crazier its laws are.

If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.

If you would abolish covetousness, you must abolish its mother, profusion.

Neither can embellishments of language be found without arrangement and expression of thoughts, nor can thoughts be made to shine without the light of language.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

Lucius Cassius ille quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat identidem in causis quaerere solebat 'cui bono' fuisset. The famous Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as a very honest and wise judge, was in the habit of asking, time and again, 'To whose benefit?

Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

So it may well be believed that when I found him taking a complete holiday, with a vast supply of books at command, he had the air of indulging in a literary debauch, if the term may be applied to so honorable an occupation.

What can be more delightful than to have some one to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as to yourself? Is not prosperity robbed of half its value if you have no one to share your joy?

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

The reward of friendship is friendship itself.

Apollo, sacred guard of earth's true core, Whence first came frenzied, wild prophetic word...

When I notice how carefully arranged his hair is and when I watch him adjusting the parting with one finger, I cannot imagine that this man could conceive of such a wicked thing as to destroy the Roman constitution.

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

Calamus fortior gladio.

Let arms give place to the robe, and the laurel of the warriors yield to the tongue of the orator.

Since it's clear then that what sets itself in motion is eternal, who could fail to attribute such a nature to the soul. Anything set in motion by external impetus is inanimate; what is animate moves by its own interior impulse. This is the nature and power of soul. And because it is the one thing out of all that sets itself in motion, then surely it was never born and will last forever.

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.

What can be more delightful than to have some one to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as to yourself?

For he (Cato) gives his opinion as if he were in Plato's Republic, not in Romulus' cesspool.

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

Esse quam videri - To be, rather than to seem (to be)