Nigel > Nigel's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“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.”
― 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, Yasalar Üzerine

“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“In times of war, the law falls silent.

Silent enim leges inter arma”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.”
― Cicero

“If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“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.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“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?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Non nobis solum nati sumus.

(Not for ourselves alone are we born.)”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Dum Spiro, spero”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“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. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
― Taylor Caldwell, A Pillar of Iron

“The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“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.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero, Philippics

“The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia

“Politicians are not born; they are excreted.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“While there's life, there's hope.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Life is nothing without friendship.”
― Cicero

“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.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“We must not say every mistake is a foolish one.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero