Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

While there's life, there's hope.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

In times of war, the law falls s

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.)

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

For walk where we will, we tread upon some story.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric.The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement.He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is also a tradition about Socrates. He liked walking, it is recorded, until a late hour of the evening, and when someone asked him why he did this he said he was trying to work up an appetite for his dinner.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Law applied to its extreme is the greatest injustice

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

There are no snares more dangerous than those which lurk under the guise of duty or the name of relationship.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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.)

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

We must stand up against old age and make up for its drawbacks by taking pains. We must fight it as we should an illness. We must look after our health, use moderate exercise, take just enough food and drink to recruit, but not to overload, our strength. Nor is it the body alone that must be supported, but the intellect and soul much more.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Two distinctive traits especially identify beyond a doubt a strong and dominant character. One trait is contempt for external circumstances, when one is convinced that men ought to respect, to desire, and to pursue only what is moral and right, that men should be subject to nothing, not to another man, not to some disturbing passion, not to Fortune. The second trait, when your character has the disposition I outlined just now, is to perform the kind of services that are significant and most beneficial; but they should also be services that are a severe challenge, that are filled with ordeals, and that endanger not only your life but also the many comforts that make life attractive.Of these two traits, all the glory, magnificence, and the advantage, too, let us not forget, are in the second, while the drive and the discipline that make men great are in the former.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

In time of war the laws are silent.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The sinews of war are infinite money.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Laws are silent in time of war.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero