Julian Quotes

For that the power to distinguish between good and less good is the property of wisdom is evident surely even to the witless; so that the serpent was a benefactor rather than a destroyer of the human race.

Who, I ask, ever found salvation through the conquests of Alexander? What city was ever more wisely governed because of them, what individual improved? Many indeed you might find whom those conquests enriched, but not one whom they made wiser or more temperate than he was by nature, if indeed they have not made him more insolent and arrogant. Whereas all who now find their salvation in philosophy owe it to Socrates.

For it is only fair that words should follow on deeds, and that he who has never avoided deeds should not avoid the phrases that describe them.
- Letters of Julian, To Niles

ἄμεινον γὰρ ὀλίγον ὀρθῶς ἢ πολὺν κακῶς πρᾶξαι χρόνον.

Can anyone be proved innocent, if it be enough to have accused him?

Some people are fond of horses, others of wild animals; in my case, I have been possessed since childhood by a prodigious desire to buy and own books.

What could be more irrational, even if ten or fifteen persons, or even, let us suppose, a hundred, for they certainly will not say that there were a thousand,–-however, let us assume that even as many persons as that ventured to transgress some one of the laws laid down by God; was it right that on account of this one thousand, six hundred thousand should be utterly destroyed?

O black winter of savage death
that froze the spring of your unnumbered charms.
The tomb tore you from brilliant day
in this, your bitter sixteenth year.
Your husband and father — blind with grief — Think of you, Anastasia, who were our sun.

If one were to rob human beings of the power to do and say what they please, that would be to take away, and to curtail the first principle of independence.