A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: 1. Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; 2. Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; 3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; 4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; 5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; 6. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.
The traitor rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly 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.
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
Where there’s life, there’s hope.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
To teach is a necessity, to please is a sweetness, to persuade is a victory.
Knowledge which is divorced from justice may be called cunning rather than wisdom.
As long as I breathe, I hope.
No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year.
Kindness is stronger than fear.
The mind becomes accustomed to things by the habitual sight of them, and neither wonders nor inquires about the reasons for things it sees all the time.
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.
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.
I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.
Friendship is the most valuable of all human possessions.
They who say that we should love our fellow-citizens but not foreigners, destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, with which benevolence and justice would perish forever.
If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.
We are bound by the law, so that we may be free.
A man of faith is also full of courage.
The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquities.
Politicians are not born; they are excreted.
Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.
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?
Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.
What one has, one ought to use; and whatever he does, he should do with all his might.
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.
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one.
I am not ashamed to confess I am ignorant of what I do not know.
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.
Ability without honor is useless.
Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.
I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn because it prevents students from using their own judgement.
Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?
Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.
The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.
For while we are enclosed in these confinements of the body, we perform as a kind of duty the heavy task of necessity; for the soul from heaven has been cast down from its dwelling on high and sunk, as it were, into the earth, a place just the opposite to godlike nature and eternity. But I believe that the immortal gods have sown souls in human bodies so there might exist beings to guard the world and after contemplating the order of heaven, might imitate it by their moderation and steadfastness in life.
