Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes
What is permissible is not always honorable.
We forget our pleasures, we remember our sufferings.
True law is right reason in agreement with nature.
There is nothing so ridiculous that some philosopher has not said it.
In anger nothing right nor judicious can be done.
The spirit is the true self.
The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
The greatest pleasures are only narrowly separated from disgust.
The first duty of man is the seeking after and the investigation of truth.
No one dances sober, unless he is insane.
Friendship makes prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
As a man who knows how to make his education into a rule of life not a means of showing off; who can control himself and obey his own principles.
If a man aspires to the highest place, it is no dishonor to him to halt at the second, or even at the third.
Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable, nothing so rough and uncultured as not to gain brilliance and refinement from eloquence.
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.
Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.
It is improbable that the material substance which is the origin of all things was created by divine Providence. It has and has always had a force and nature of its own.
Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.
O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!
We are all motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is, the more he is inspired by glory.
Justice commands us to have mercy upon all men, to consult the interests of the whole human race, to give to every one his due.
Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.
In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.
Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.
Take from a man his reputation for probity, and the more shrewd and clever he is, the more hated and mistrusted he becomes.
The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.
There is, I know not how, in minds a certain presage, as it were, of a future existence: this has the deepest root, and is most discoverable, in the greatest geniuses and most exulted souls.
