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Quote by Benvenuto Cellini

“My answer to this was that the purest-bred cats made better mousers when they were fat than when they were starving; and in the same way honest craftsmen did much better work when they had plenty to live on.”

Quote by Benvenuto Cellini

Book:Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

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Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

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Author

Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini was an Italian sculptor, goldsmith, and writer, born on November 3, 1500, and died on February 13, 1571. He is known for his exquisite craftsmanship and contributions to the art of the Renaissance. more

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“My lords, for more than half an hour you've not stopped questioning me about some fantastic story or other; one could in fact say that you're babbling, or rambling. By babbling, I mean, that you're talking nonsense; by rambling, that you're saying nothing at all.”

Mgg Rambling Benvenuto Cellini

Book:The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Source: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

“There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric. The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement. He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.”

Memory Simonides Cicero De Oratore Loci

Author:Marcus Tullius Cicero

“When Simonides was discussing wisdom and riches with Hieron's wife, and she asked him which was better, to become wise or to become wealthy, he replied, 'To become wealthy. For I see the wise sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.”

Aristotle Simonides

Book:Rhetoric

Source: Rhetoric

“Stranger, go back to Sparta and tell our people that we who were slain obeyed the code.”

Sparta Simonides

Author:Simonides

“One thousand years, ten thousand years are but a tiny dot, the smallest segment of a point, an invisible hair.”

Willis Barnstone Simonides

Author:Simonides

“With mindless bravura Ares washed his long sleek arrowheads in the crimson waters within their chests, and dust now lies not on the living flesh of javeliners, but on the vivid remnants of lifeless bodies.”

Willis Barnstone Simonides

Author:Simonides

“All these victors from the Tyrrhenian wars we're on their way to Apollo at Delph with their first plunder when they found, their grave on one night, in one ship, in one deep sea.”

Willis Barnstone Simonides

Author:Simonides

“I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own - that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's Time, not his.”

Book:The Superannuated Man

Source: The Superannuated Man

“All these victors from the Tyrrhenian wars were on their way to Apollo at Delphi with their first plunder when they found, their grave on one night, in one ship, in one deep sea.”

Willis Barnstone Simonides

Author:Simonides

“If you are a simple mortal, do not speak of tomorrow or how long this man may be among the happy, for change comes suddenly like the shifting flight of a dragonfly.”

Willis Barnstone Simonides

Author:Simonides