Quotes from Plutarch

The wildest colts make the best horses.

It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him for the one is only belief - the other contempt.

When the candles are out all women are fair.

The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.

Medicine to produce health must examine disease and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.

For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human.

Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, answered that it was the soul of this world.

Abstain from beans.

Distressed valor challenges great respect, even from an enemy.

He made the city [Athens], great as it was when he took it, the greatest and richest of all cities, and grew to be superior in power to kings and tyrants. Some of these actually appointed him guardian of their sons, but he did not make his estate a single drachma greater than it was when his father left it to him.

Learn to be pleased with everything; with wealth, so far as it makes us beneficial to others; with poverty, for not having much to care for; and with obscurity, for being unenvied.

Let us carefully observe those good qualities wherein our enemies excel us and endeavor to excel them, by avoiding what is faulty, and imitating what is excellent in them.

Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together yield themselves up when taken little by little.

Poverty is not dishonourable in itself, but only when it arises from idleness, intemperance, extravagance, and folly.

The first evil those who are prone to talk suffer, is that they hear nothing.

The man who is completely wise and virtuous has no need of glory, except so far as it disposes and eases his way to action by the greater trust that it procures him.

The whole life of man is but a point of time let us enjoy it.

To find a fault is easy to do better may be difficult.

All men whilst they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.

Vultures are the most righteous of birds: they do not attack even the smallest living creature.

Many things which cannot be overcome when they are together yield themselves up when taken little by little.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

In a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer.

Evidence of trust begets trust, and love is reciprocated by love.