Cicero Quotes

La conducta privada de un hombre no puede ser separada de su conducta pública; son dos caras de una misma moneda.

Hukum dibuat bukan untuk dilanggar, tetapi untuk dipatuhi

A certain Spartan, whose name hasn’t even been passed down, despised death so greatly that when he was being led to execution after his condemnation by the ephors, he maintained a relaxed and joyous expression. To an enemy’s challenge – ‘Is this how you mock the laws of Lycurgus?’ – he answered, ‘On the contrary, I give great thanks to him, for he decreed a punishment that I can pay without taking out a loan or juggling debts.’101 O worthy man of Sparta! His spirit was so great that it seems he must have been an innocent man condemned to die. There have been many such in our own country.

Respiraro, si te videro.

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.)

A man of faith is also full of courage

For what, in the name of heaven, is more to be desired than wisdom? What is more to be prized? What is better for a man, what more worthy of his nature? Those who seek after it are called philosophers; and philosophy is nothing else, if one will translate the word into our idiom, than ‘the love of wisdom.’ Wisdom … is ‘the knowledge of things human and divine and of the causes by which those things are controlled.’ And if the man lives who would belittle the study of philosophy, I quite fail to see what in the world he would see fit to praise.

We may, I think, give the name of perfect duty to the absolute right, which the Greeks term κατόρθωμα;1 while contingent duty is what they call καθη̂κον.2 According to their definitions, what is right in itself is perfect duty; that for the doing of which a satisfactory reason can be given is a contingent

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

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

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.

what shall I do with Diodotus the Stoic, whose pupil I have been from a boy, who has been my associate for so many years, who lives in my house, whom I both admire and love, and who despises the doctrines of Antiochus that you are putting forward? ‘Our doctrines,’ you will say, ‘are the only true ones.’ If they are true, certainly they are the only true ones, for there cannot be several true systems disagreeing with one another. Then is it we that are shameless, who do not wish to make a slip, or they presumptuous, who have persuaded themselves that they alone know everything?

They are such fools that they seem to expect that, though the Republic is lost, their fish-ponds will be safe.

There might be believed to exist one Universal Monarch in heaven [who] be accounted both king and father of all creatures.

Morbi perniciosiores pluresque sunt animi quam corporis.