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Cicero Quotes

Browse 12 quotes about Cicero.

Cicero Quotes

“Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than Socrates? Was he more patient, more charitable, than Epictetus? Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, than Epicurus? In what respect was he the superior of Zoroaster? Was he gentler than Lao-tsze, more universal than Confucius? Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those of Zeno? Did he express grander truths than Cicero? Was his mind subtler than Spinoza’s? Was his brain equal to Kepler’s or Newton’s? Was he grander in death – a sublimer martyr than Bruno? Was he in intelligence, in the force and beauty of expression, in breadth and scope of thought, in wealth of illustration, in aptness of comparison, in knowledge of the human brain and heart, of all passions, hopes and fears, the equal of Shakespeare, the greatest of the human race?”

WisdomKindnessAtheismBuddhismPatienceStoicismNewtonShakespeareBuddhaWilliam ShakespeareSocratesSpinozaKeplerIsaac NewtonCiceroEpicurusEpictetusGautama BuddhaJohannes KeplerBaruch SpinozaZenoZoroasterBrunoGiordano BrunoLaoziZeno Of Citium
Book:About The Holy Bible
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“Kant’s conception of dignity is indebted to Cicero and the Roman conception of dignitas, according to which dignity is an elevated position or rank. The Roman dignitas is a complicated notion that has further connotations, e.g. worthiness, duties and privileges. Many of these are reflected in present-day usage, as when one speaks of a ‘dignitary’ or behaving with dignity. However, the additional connotations are not essential to dignitas.”

DignityKantCicero
Author:Oliver Sensen
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“The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…”

LibrariesLockeBaconEmersonCicero
Book:First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process
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“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.”

MemorySimonidesCiceroDe OratoreLoci
Author:Marcus Tullius Cicero
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“The women of Republican times are silent. Rarely calling for comment in the history books, they are named on tombstones, flit in arrogant beauty through poetry, or appear even as monsters of iniquity in a court of law. Yet they themselves do not speak and they have left no literature of any sort of their own. In this book, however, Roman women live and love and hate anything but silently. (author's note To the Reader in 'A Roman Death'.)”

WomenHistoryThrillerRomeMystery NovelCaesarCiceroHistorical ThrillerLate Antiquity
Author:Joan O'Hagan
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