A: Dolorem existimo maximum malorum omnium. M: Etiamne malus quam dedecus? A: Non audeo id dicere equidem, et me pudet tam cito de sententia esse dei… - Cicero

The goddess Fortune is mad, blind, and stupid, some philosophers maintain. They declare that she stands upon a revolving globe of stone; whither Chance impels this stone, thither, they say, does Fortune fall. She is blind, they repeat, for that she fails wholly to perceive whereto she attaches herself. Moreover they declare that she is mad because she is cruel, uncertain, and inconstant; stupid because she knows not how to tell worthy from unworthy.

When I notice how carefully arranged his hair is and when I watch him adjusting the parting with one finger, I cannot imagine that this man could conceive of such a wicked thing as to destroy the Roman constitution.

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.