Diogenes of Sinope Quotes

The noblest people are those despising wealth, learning, pleasure and life; esteeming above them poverty, ignorance, hardship and death.

I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.

Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, "Behold Plato's man!"

He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, "I am looking for a human."

Asked where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."

When the slave auctioneer asked in what he was proficient, he replied, "In ruling people."

He was going into a theatre, meeting face to face those who were coming out, and being asked why, "This," he said, "is what I practise doing all my life."

If you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you.

Once he saw the officials of a temple leading away some one who had stolen a bowl belonging to the treasurers, and said, "The great thieves are leading away the little thief."

Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends in order to save them.

Self-taught poverty is a help toward philosophy, for the things which philosophy attempts to teach by reasoning, poverty forces us to practice.

Diogenes the cynic, seeing one of the so-called freedmen pluming himself, while many heartily congratulated him, marveled at the absence of reason and discernment. “A man might as well,” he said, “proclaim that one of his servants became a grammarian, a geometrician, or musician, when he has no idea whatever of the art.” For as the proclamation cannot make them men of knowledge, so neither can it make them free.

It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.

He once begged alms of a statue, and, when asked why he did so, replied, "To get practice in being refused."

When asked why people give to beggars but not to philosophers, he replied, 'Because they expect they may become lame and blind, but never that they will become philosophers.'