Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

In time of war the laws are silent.

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

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

True nobility is exempt from fear.

That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place.

Never injure a friend, even in jest.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

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

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

Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.

What is thine is mine, and all mine is thine.

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

You will be as much value to others as you have been to yourself.

Before beginning, plan carefully.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

We forget our pleasures, we remember our sufferings.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

To live is to think.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

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. The traitor is the plague.

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

What then is freedom ? The power to live as one wishes.

To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?

What sweetness is left in life, if you take away friendship? Robbing life of friendship is like robbing the world of the sun. A true friend is more to be esteemed than kinsfolk.