Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One does nothing who tries to console a despondent person with word. A friend is one who aids with deeds at a critical time when deeds are called for.
The gods have sent medicines for the venom of serpents, but there is no medicine for a bad woman. She is more noxious than the viper, or than fire itself.
Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?
No man on earth is truly free, All are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.
If your life at night is good, you think you have Everything; but, if in that quarter things go wrong, You will consider your best and truest interests Most hateful.
Alas, how right the ancient saying is: We, who are old, are nothing else but noise And shape. Like mimicries of dreams we go, And have no wits, although we think us wise.
The brash unbridled tongue, the lawless folly of fools, will end in pain. But the life of wise content is blest with quietness, escapes the storm and keeps its house secure.
Life is short; this being so, who would pursue great things and not bear with what is at hand? These are the ways of madmen and men of evil counsel, at least in my judgment.
The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.
Oh, trebly blest the placid lot of those whose hearth foundations are in pure love laid, where husband's breast with tempered ardor glows, and wife, oft mother, is in heart a maid!
Let no one think of me that I am humble or weak or passive; let them understand I am of a different kind: dangerous to my enemies, loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.
I have found power in the mysteries of thought, exaltation in the changing of the Muses; I have been versed in the reasonings of men; but Fate is stronger than anything I have known.
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. Tragedy isn't getting something or failure to get it; it's losing something you already have. Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.
If a man rejoice not in his drinking, he is mad; for in drinking it's possible ... to fondle breasts, and to caress well tended locks, and there is dancing withal, and oblivion of woe.
Terrible is the force of the waves of sea, terrible is the rush of the river and the blasts of hot fire, and terrible are a thousand other things; but none is such a terrible evil as woman.
You women are all the same, if bed's all right, You think everything else can go to the wind. But if there's any infringement of your bed-rights, Then fair is foul and all hell's let loose.
It's folly that women measure their happiness with the pleasures of the bed, but they do. And when the pleasure cools or their man goes missing, all they once lived for turns dark and hateful.
Old men's prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them.
That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.
I care for riches, to make gifts To friends, or lead a sick man back to health With ease and plenty. Else small aid is wealth For daily gladness; once a man be done With hunger, rich and poor are all as one.
Our lives ... are but a little while, so let them run as sweetly as you can, and give no thought to grief from day to day. For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, but hurries on its business, and is gone.
In my opinion, the unjust man whose tongue is full of glozing rhetoric, merits the heaviest punishment; vaunting that he can with his tongue gloze over injustice, he dares to act wickedly, yet he is not over-wise.
There is nothing more hostile to a city that a tyrant, under whom in the first and chiefest place, there are not laws in common, but one man, keeping the law himself to himself, has the sway, and this is no longer equal.
When roused to rage the maddening populace storms, their fury, like a rolling flame, bursts forth unquenchable; but give its violence ways, it spends itself, and as its force abates, learns to obey and yields it to your will.
Happy the man whose lot it is to know The secrets of the earth. He hastens not To work his fellows hurt by unjust deeds, But with rapt admiration contemplates Immortal Nature's ageless harmony, And how and when the order came to be.
To have found you is a dear happiness; and to be Apollo's son is beyond all my hopes; but there is something I want to say to you alone. Come; this is a private matter between us two - anything you tell me shall be as secret as the grave.
Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
Time will explain it all. Waste no tears over the griefs of yesterday. One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives. Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other. Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.
Lady, the sun's light to our eyes is dear, And fair the tranquil reaches of the sea, And flowery earth in May, and bounding waters; And so right many fair things I might praise; Yet nothing is so radiant and so fair As for souls childless, with desire sore-smitten, To see the light of babes about the house.
He is life's liberating force. He is release of limbs and communion through dance. He is laughter, and music in flutes. He is repose from all cares -- he is sleep! When his blood bursts from the grape and flows across tables laid in his honor to fuse with our blood, he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadows of ivy-cool sleep.
Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not, not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.
Doth some one say that there be gods above? There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool, Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you. Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words, No undue credence: for I say that kings kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud, And doing thus are happier than those, Who live calm pious lives day after day. All divinity is built-up from our good and evil luck.
Mankind . . . possesses two supreme blessings. First of these is the goddess Demeter, or Earth whichever name you choose to call her by. It was she who gave to man his nourishment of grain. But after her there came the son of Semele, who matched her present by inventing liquid wine as his gift to man. For filled with that good gift, suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles of the day. There is no other medicine for misery.
Young man, two are the forces most precious to mankind. The first is Demeter, the Goddess. She is the Earth -- or any name you wish to call her -- and she sustains humanity with solid food. Next came Dionysus, the son of the virgin, bringing the counterpart to bread: wine and the blessings of life's flowing juices. His blood, the blood of the grape, lightens the burden of our mortal misery. Though himself a God, it is his blood we pour out to offer thanks to the Gods. And through him, we are blessed.