Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

In times of war, the law falls silent. Silent enim leges inter arma

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

Non nobis solum nati sumus. (Not for ourselves alone are we born.)

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.

Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.

Dum Spiro, spero

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.

While there's life, there's hope.

The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.

The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.

To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.

The life of the dead is placed on the memories of the living. The love you gave in life keeps people alive beyond their time. Anyone who was given love will always live on in another's heart.

I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.

It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.

We must not say every mistake is a foolish one.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

It is a great thing to know your vices.

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.

I am not ashamed to confess I am ignorant of what I do not know.

A happy life consists in tranquility of mind.

Your enemies can kill you, but only your friends can hurt you.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

Our span of life is brief, but is long enough for us to live well and honestly.

Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error

Freedom is participation in power.

Law applied to its extreme is the greatest injustice

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere. (No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year.)

Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.

Never injure a friend, even in jest.

Nemo est qui tibi sapientius suadere possit te ipso: numquam labere, si te audies. (Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself: if you heed yourself, you'll never go wrong.)

God's law is 'right reason.' When perfectly understood it is called 'wisdom.' When applied by government in regulating human relations it is called 'justice.

To be content with what we possess is the greatest and most secure of riches.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

a friend is a second self

Ability without honor is useless.

What one has, one ought to use; and whatever he does, he should do with all his might.

Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.

A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.

We are bound by the law, so that we may be free.

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.

We must not only obtain Wisdom: we must enjoy her.

Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.

Sed nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosphorum. (There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.)

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.

Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.

Dogs wait for us faithfully.

To teach is a necessity, to please is a sweetness, to persuade is a victory.

Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.

Cultivation of the mind is as necessary as food to the body

Trust no one unless you have eaten much salt with him.

Endless money forms the sinews of war.

He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.

To be rather than to seem.

A man of faith is also full of courage

They who say that we should love our fellow-citizens but not foreigners, destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, with which benevolence and justice would perish forever

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

A mental stain can neither be blotted out by the passage of time nor washed away by any waters.

I have always been of the opinion that unpopularity earned by doing what is right is not unpopularity at all, but glory.

In a republic this rule ought to be observed: that the majority should not have the predominant power.

True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions.

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

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.

Everyone has the obligation to ponder well his own specific traits of character. He must also regulate them adequately and not wonder whether someone else's traits might suit him better. The more definitely his own a man's character is, the better it fits him.

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.

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.

The reward of friendship is friendship itself.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

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

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

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

Economics is a political argument. It is not – and can never be – a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. Therefore, when faced with an economic argument, you must ask the age-old question ‘Cui bono?’ (Who benefits?), first made famous by the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.

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

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?

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.

Calamus fortior gladio.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. Marcus Tullius Cicero

In this statement, my Scipio, I build on your own admirable definition, that there can be no community, properly so called, unless it be regulated by a combination of rights. And by this definition it appears that a multitude of men may be just as tyrannical as a single despot and indeed this is the most odious of all tyrannies, since no monster can be more barbarous than the mob, which assumes the name and mask of the people.

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

Let us assume that entertainment is the sole end of reading; even so I think you would hold that no mental employment is so broadening to the sympathies or so enlightening to the understanding. Other pursuits belong not to all times, all ages, all conditions; but this gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success, and offers a haven of consolation to failure. Through the night-watches, on all our journeyings, and in our hours of ease, it is our unfailing companion.

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?

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.

As for myself, I can only exhort you to look on Friendship as the most valuable of all human possessions, no other being equally suited to the moral nature of man, or so applicable to every state and circumstance, whether of prosperity or adversity, in which he can possibly be placed. But at the same time I lay it down as a fundamental axiom that "true Friendship can only subsist between those who are animated by the strictest principles of honour and virtue." When I say this, I would not be thought to adopt the sentiments of those speculative moralists who pretend that no man can justly be deemed virtuous who is not arrived at that state of absolute perfection which constitutes, according to their ideas, the character of genuine wisdom. This opinion may appear true, perhaps, in theory, but is altogether inapplicable to any useful purpose of society, as it supposes a degree of virtue to which no mortal was ever capable of rising.

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.

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.

For while we are enclosed in these confinements of the body, we perform as a kind of duty the heavy task of necessity; for the soul from heaven has been cast down from its dwelling on high and sunk, as it were, into the earth, a place just the opposite to godlike nature and eternity. But I believe that the immortal gods have sown souls in human bodies so there might exist beings to guard the world and after contemplating the order of heaven, might imitate it by their moderation and steadfastness in life.