Quotes About Nero

Pliny the Elder, who when Rome was burning requested Nero to play You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille. Never got a dinner!

Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest spectacle?—the burning of Rome in Nero's time, for instance? Why, it would merely say, 'Town burned down; no insurance; boy brast a window, fireman brake his neck!' Why, THAT ain't a picture!

Rome, yes, I say, thinking in quick succession of the Pantheon, the Colosseum and the cardinals screwing around while wondering whether women have souls or not, and of Nero, of course, who killed his closest family and let the city burn. I don't reckon he liked people, either.

soon dinner will run into bed-time, and we shall all eat reclining like the ancient Romans--about whose digestion, you know, I have often wondered. Whether a dose of rhubabrb might have made a difference to Nero or Caligula is a question you might ponder, my dear, next time you go through your Tacitus.

Say what you will about Nero, but at least he was a hell of a fiddler. This guy's burning it all down without a soundtrack."

Once we went off into the singles world, I noticed there is something very unique about Brother Nero. People are drawn to him, and he has intangibles and charisma that cannot be emulated or duplicated.

Muitas das notas de Marco Aurélio a si próprio, (…) baseavam-se nos riscos de tirania de um imperador. Detestava especialmente Nero – um homem à mercê dos mais loucos impulsos, como um animal selvagem – ou, como Marco Aurélio descreveria imemoriavelmente "Um carácter obscuro: efeminado, grosseiro, selvagem, animalesco, pueril, cobarde, falso, tolo, mercenário e despótico.

Ever since poets have written and women have read them (for which the poets should be most deeply grateful) women have been called angels so many times that, in very truth, in their simplicity of soul, they have believed the compliment, forgetting that, for money, the same poets have glorified Nero as a demigod . . .

Even as a young officer he was such a hard drinker that his name, Tiberius Claudius Nero, was displaced by the nickname 'Biberius Caldius Mero'—meaning: 'Drinker of wine with no water added'.

So, suspecting that Nero had a contract on her, she got herself Mithridatized against the poisons that would have been available to her son's underlings. Like Mithridates, Agrippina eventually died by more mechanical methods as her son (supposedly) had assassins slay her, thus providing us with the small but meaningful lesson that one cannot be robust against everything. And, two thousand years later, nobody has found a method for us to get "fortified" against swords.

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. To sum him up, Nero believed in erudition, aesthetics, and risk taking—little else.

trusting that Nero would be able to read his mind.

The freer Nero's time, the more compelled he felt to compensate for lost time in filling gaps in his natural interests

To Nero, a system built on illusions of understanding probability is bound to collapse.

Nero should have felt just as proud—and satisfied—had the envelope contained statements of losses.

and no less intellectual than Nero.

Nero was mindful of his health, spending at least an hour a day at the gym or in the pool.

So, Nero switched careers to what is called proprietary trading.

Time waits for no country these days, however, not even one as important, or unimportant, as China. Nero fiddled, Jiang theorizes.

Europe has nothing to recommend it but its old age, and the Petrified forest in Arizona makes a Sucker out of it for old age. Why, that forest was there and doing business before Nero took his first Violin lesson.

Nero may have understood how to tune his cithern, but he disgraced his imperial office both by slackening and by tightening the strings.

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest of human creature that walks.

Mrs. Jarvis, as she came out of the Rectory gate, saw him coming, and her Newfoundland dog, Nero, slowly swept his tail from side to side.