Don't keep your good manners to the end another time, but begin with them.

My ideal is for each to do what he knows and what he can.

O ye gods, grant unto me to have little and to want nothing.

I delight to lodge in such temples as are not regularly kept closed. None of the gods reject me; they make me partner of their roof.

I have not yet learned to keep still.

The only prayer which a well-meaning man can pray is, O ye gods, give me whatever is fitting unto me!

As soldiers need not only courage but tactics also, so does a philosopher need not only courage and philosophy but discernment also, to tell what his right time of dying is -- so that he neither seek it nor flee it.

In my judgment, excellence and wealth are direct opposites, since when the one shrinks, the other grows, and when one grows, the other shrinks.

Multicolored stones and paintings, walkways, and theaters are useless in a city unless it also contains wisdom and law. Such things are the subject of wisdom and law, not equivalent to them.

When I review Xerxes' achievements, I praise him, not for having yoked the Hellespont, but for having crossed it. But I can see that Nero will neither sail through the Isthmus nor complete his digging.

Every argument is incapable of helping unless it is singular and addressed to a single person. Therefore, one who discourses in any other way presumably does so from love of reputation.

All the earth is mine, and I have a right to go all over it and through it.

It is a true man's part not to err, but it is also noble of a man to perceive his error.

I asked certain rich men if they felt embittered. 'How could we not?' they said. So I asked them what caused this anguish. They blamed their wealth.

I asked questions when I was a stripling, and it is not my business to ask questions now, but to teach people what I have discovered.

Never may a man prone to believe scandal be a despot or a popular leader! Under his guidance, democracy itself will be despotism.

Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.

The gods do not need sacrifices, so what might one do to please them? Acquire wisdom, it seems to me, and do all the good in one's power to those humans who deserve it.

Nero may have understood how to tune his cithern, but he disgraced his imperial office both by slackening and by tightening the strings.

Just as an individual of pre-eminent worth transforms democracy into a monarchy of the best man, even so the rule of one man, if in all things it has an eye to the common welfare, is democracy.