Plutarch quotes - page 8

Young men," said Cæsar, "hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young. (Plutarch)

Laughing at his own son, who got his mother, and by his mother's means his father also, to indulge him, he told him that he had the most power of any one in Greece: "For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother."

Plutarch

For my part, I had rather be the first man among these fellows than the second man in Rome.

Plutarch

Yet through Alexander (the Great) Bactria and the Caucasus learned to revere the gods of the Greeks ... Alexander established more than seventy cities among savage tribes, and sowed all Asia with Greek magistracies ... Egypt would not have its Alexandria, nor Mesopotamia its Seleucia, nor Sogdiana its Prophthasia, nor India its Bucephalia, nor the Caucasus a Greek city, for by the founding of cities in these places savagery was extinguished and the worse element, gaining familiarity with the better, changed under its influence.

Plutarch

Leo Byzantius said, "What would you do, if you saw my wife, who scarce reaches up to my knees?... Yet," went he on, "as little as we are, when we fall out with each other, the city of Byzantium is not big enough to hold us."

Plutarch

Anacharsis said a man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible favours and blessings of Fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Plutarch

Go on, my friend, and fear nothing; you carry Cæsar and his fortunes in your boat.

Plutarch

For many, as Cranton tells us, and those very wise men, not now but long ago, have deplored the condition of human nature, esteeming life a punishment, and to be born a man the highest pitch of calamity; this, Aristotle tells us, Silenus declared when he was brought captive to Midas.

Plutarch

Abstain from beans; that is, keep out of public offices, for anciently the choice of the officers of state was made by beans.

Plutarch

You ask of me then for what reason it was that Pythagoras abstained from eating of flesh. I for my part do much admire in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds.

Plutarch

Thus they let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his rage. (Plutarch)

To one commending an orator for his skill in amplifying petty matters, Agesilaus said, "I do not think that shoemaker a good workman that makes a great shoe for a little foot."

Plutarch

He said that in his whole life he most repented of three things: one was that he had trusted a secret to a woman; another, that he went by water when he might have gone by land; the third, that he had remained one whole day without doing any business of moment.

Plutarch

You speak truth," said Themistocles; "I should never have been famous if I had been of Seriphus; nor you, had you been of Athens.

Plutarch

The most perfect soul, says Heraclitus, is a dry light, which flies out of the body as lightning breaks from a cloud.

Plutarch

To conduct great matters and never commit a fault is above the force of human nature.

Plutarch

What meal is not expensive? That for which no animal is put to death. ... one participating of feeling, of seeing, of hearing, of imagination, and of intellection; which each animal hath received from Nature for the acquiring of what is agreeable to it, and the avoiding what is disagreeable.

Plutarch

And it is said that when he took his seat for the first time under the golden canopy on the royal throne, Demaratus the Corinthian, a well-meaning man and a friend of Alexander's, as he had been of Alexander's father, burst into tears, as old men will, and declared that those Hellenes were deprived of great pleasure who had died before seeing Alexander seated on the throne of Dareius.

Plutarch

Eat not thy heart; which forbids to afflict our souls, and waste them with vexatious cares.

Plutarch

Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone."

Plutarch

If it were not my purpose to combine foreign things with things Greek, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of Greek justice and peace over every nation, I should not content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Greeks should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos... (Plutarch)

As it is in the proverb, played Cretan against Cretan.

Plutarch

Diogenes the Cynic, when a little before his death he fell into a slumber, and his physician rousing him out of it asked him whether anything ailed him, wisely answered, "Nothing, sir; only one brother anticipates another,-Sleep before Death."

Plutarch

Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all.

Plutarch

He was a man, which, as Plato saith, is a very inconstant creature.

Plutarch

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