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.

—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.

—Cicero

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

—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

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

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

“To live is to think.”

—Marcus Tullius Cicero

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men’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.

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

While there’s life, there’s hope.

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

—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?

—Cicero

Not for ourselves alone are we born.

—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.

—Cicero

In times of war, the law falls silent.

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?

—Cicero

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

—Cicero

It is a great thing to know your vices.

—Cicero

Life is nothing without friendship.

—Cicero

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

—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.

—Cicero