Top 15 Diogenes of Sinope Quotes

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

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

Thieves and fighters do not come from eaters of barley-bread; but informers and tyrants come from meat-eaters.

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.

Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.

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

Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house.

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

Boasting, like gilded armour, is very different inside from outside.

οἱ μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχθροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὼ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.

When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: "Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?"

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

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."

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