Quotes About Cicero

I do not say with Cicero, that errors wear out by age, and that religion increases and grows better day by day. For the world (as will be shortly seen) labours as much as it can to shake off all knowledge of God

including the partial copy of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things—unseen by scholars for more than five hundred years—and eight previously unknown speeches of Cicero.

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.

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

The essence of Ciceronian philosophy is a sense of wonder at the interconnectedness of human beings to one another and to the universe that encompasses them.

But if I am wrong in thinking the human soul immortal, I am glad to be wrong; nor will I allow the mistake which gives me so much pleasure to be wrested from me as long as I live.

In Cicero's time the left and the right wing in ethical philosophy were represented by the Epicureans and the Stoics respectively, while the Peripatetics held a middle ground.

O noble philosophy! Why, they seem to take the sun out of the universe when they deprive life of friendship, than which we have from the immortal gods no better, no more delightful boon.

Il me semble que cette méditation anticipée des malheurs humains produit presque le même effet que la guérison obtenue avec le temps, sinon que, dans le premier cas, c'est le raisonnement qui guérit, et dans le second, la nature ; mais on comprend l'essentiel, à savoir que le mal tenu pour le plus grand de tous n'est jamais si grand qu'il puisse détruire la vie heureuse.

O tempora! O mores! O what times (are these)! what morals!

Few students or teachers were interested in Cicero or Erasmus's other literary heroes. There was, however, a new teacher at Magdalen College named John Colet, who had immersed himself in the humanism coming out of Italy and its Platonist themes. He and Erasmus found an instant harmony. In listening to Colet speak, Erasmus wrote later, he "seemed to be listening to Plato himself."14

It is Cicero who made public speaking one of the essential tools of Western self-government and democracy.

But as Cicero, when he setteth down an idea of a perfect orator, doth not mean that every pleader should be such; and so likewise, when a prince or a courtier hath been described by such as have handled those subjects, the mould hath used to be made according to the perfection of the art, and not according to common practice: so I understand it, that it ought to be done in the description of a politic man, I mean politic for his own fortune.

Cicero calls it the most horrendous torture.' So hideous was the act of crucifixion upon a man that he also writes that the very word `cross' should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears.

I'm an essayist. And this is a genre that has existed for a few thousand years. Ever heard of Cicero? So these rules that I'm working under are not mine but rather were established by writers who recognized the difference between the hard research of journalism and the kind of inquiry of mind that characterizes the essay.

In the usual course of study I had come to a book of a certain Cicero.

So even Cicero imagined moveable type, but only in his polemic as an absurd idea. He used the phrase formae literarum, and when moveable type was finally made some sixteen centuries later, that is the name they gave it—though it was not such an absurd idea after all.

Cicerón tachó a la ingratitud de olvido.

They credited only their own prejudices, whence the accusation of "misanthropy," a crime imputed to them by Cicero, Seneca, Celsius, and, with them, all antiquity.

Cicero's take on official Rome was less flattering: "A more raffish assemblage never sat down in a low-grade music hall," he huffed

Cicerón decía que lo fundamental para llevar una existencia ordenada era el respeto a uno mismo y a los demás, buscando la trascendencia. Una

Cicero wouldn't approve of my writing style, but at least I pronounce his name with a hard C.

The Founding Fathers were devotees of Cicero and Locke, of the Bible and Aristotle.

Cicero, in his treatise concerning the Nature of the Gods, having said that three Jupiters were enumerated by theologians, adds that the third was of Crete, the son of Saturn, and that his tomb is shown in that island.