He who relies on insuring his health through indolence is as foolish as he who thinks that by silence he can perfect his voice.
Whoever wants to live in prosperity must learn to live in need.
Small vices seem great if discovered in those to whom power is entrusted.
It seems to me that both boldness and timidity come from the same source - ignorance.
We often ask a question without needing an answer, but to make our voice heard and to gain the goodwill of the other, wanting to draw him into a discussion. Taking the answers before others, striving to get hold of one's hearing, and occupying another's thoughts, is the same as rushing to kiss a man who wants to kiss another, or turning back a glance directed at another. .
There is also hope for those who have nothing left.
It is precisely the surplus that makes us happy, and not what everyone needs.
Learn to listen and you will be able to benefit even from those who speak badly.
We must not rush with punishments and sanctions. We need not fear because someone will be punished late, but because he who is punished on the spot will prove to have been punished unjustly. This happened not infrequently. Who among us is so cruel as to punish his slave every five days just because he has burnt his food or overturned a chair or moved too slowly in carrying out an order? Because precisely such things, when they happen, rob us of soul balance and fill us with fierceness. Just as when we look at things through a fog, mistakes seem exaggerated when we look at them through the cloud of anger.
A few vices are enough to obscure many virtues.
There is no animal more ferocious than man, which gathers in him negative passions and power.
No spoken word was more useful than a lot of unspoken words.
The most famous of the philosophers - Pythagoras, Socrates, Archesilaos, Carneades - wrote nothing. On what grounds, then, are they considered philosophers when, having leisure at their disposal, they left writing to the sophists? By virtue of the fact that they lived in accordance with what they were teaching others.
Put aside everything outside and turn your curiosity inward; if you enjoy learning about flaws and vices, you'll find enough at home too.
Like the grain of wheat which, enclosed in a vessel, gains in volume but loses in quality, so also the word, on the lips of the licentious man, swells because of lies, but kills confidence.
The need to love gives birth to an imagined attraction.
Right judgments are characteristic of all men, because nature itself shows the way to the right ones, but philosophers differ from the majority in that, with them, these judgments are opposed to unfavorable circumstances.
The wonderful ones attract by their very action and immediately awaken in us the desire to act.
In conditions of great danger and difficult circumstances, the crowd usually looks for salvation more from something contrary to reason than from something in harmony with it.
The Roman Cato said that the soul of the lover lives in the soul of the one he loves. I would say, on the contrary, that in the lover's soul is present the whole soul of the beloved person, his whole life, character and deeds. This problem is analogous to that of where beauty is found - in the desert or in the soul of the Bedouin? Neither there nor there, because beauty is nothing but the ability to explain its imaginary presence to yourself. Love is not a fact, it is only the aspiration to be, as far as possible, in possession of such a fact. In this lies the cause of all its clashes and complications, its problems and shortcomings. Love is like a ray of sunshine: visible, close, present, which cannot be grabbed by anyone.
The power of speech lies in expressing much in few words.
To do bad deeds is humiliating, to do good when nothing threatens you is a common thing. A good man is one who does great and noble deeds even if he risks everything.
Misers... They are always of boundless greed and always feel the need to capture the future as well. I am told: "They save for children and descendants". How so? For those to whom they give nothing during their lifetime?
Such is the nature of wealth: it needs witnesses, spectators. And another thing is philosophy, the knowledge of what ought to be known about the gods; all these, even if they pass unnoticed, emanate a radiance of their own, and give to the soul a light and a joy dear to it, for the soul tends to good, whether any one notices it, or whether it remains hidden from all men and gods. Thus virtue, truth, the beauty of mathematical sciences, geometry and astrology attract him: can the wealth of the rich, all these zorzonas, salves and women's ornaments, be compared with these?
When all conditions are the same for all, the bravest emerges victorious.
Those who are thirsty for praise are poor in merit.
Everything that happens to reckless and memoryless people flies away with the passage of time, and, keeping nothing, accumulating nothing, forever destitute of goods but full of hopes, they look to the future but do not notice the present.
Among the Hellenes, the smart talk and the stupid solve their problems.
Even a pretense of virtue insensibly gives rise to a tendency to become familiar with it.
Those who are capable of obtaining victory do not always know how to use it.