Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes: 20

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

• 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.

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

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

• The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

• The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.

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

• Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

• A friend is, as it were, a second self.

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

• 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.

• While there's life, there's hope.

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

• To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.

• 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.

• I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.

• 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.

• Sed nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosphorum. (There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.)

  De Divinatione

• We must not only obtain Wisdom: we must enjoy her.

  Selected Works

• O philosophy, life's guide! O searcher-out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could we and every age of men have been without thee? Thou hast produced cities; thou hast called men scattered about into the social enjoyment of life.