1,226 Quotes by Marcus Tullius Cicero

This is our special duty, that if anyone specially needs our help, we should give him such help to the utmost of our power.

This, therefore, is a law not found in books, but written on the fleshly tablets of the heart, which we have not learned from man, received or read, but which we have caught up from Nature herself, sucked in and imbibed; the knowledge of which we were not taught, but for which we were made; we received it not by education, but by intuition.

The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret -- that man is black at heart: mark and avoid him.

Just what is the civil law? What neither influence can affect, nor power break, nor money corrupt: were it to be suppressed or even merely ignored or inadequately observed, no one would feel safe about anything, whether his own possessions, the inheritance he expects from his father, or the bequests he makes to his children.

It is certain that memory contains not only philosophy, but all the arts and all that appertain to the use of life.

Friendship is not to be sought for its wages, but because its revenue consists entirely in the love which it implies.

To reduce man to the duties of his own city, and to disengage him from duties to the members of other cities, is to break the universal society of the human race.

Let us not listen to those who think we ought to be angry with our enemies, and who believe this to be great and manly. Nothing is so praiseworthy, nothing so clearly shows a great and noble soul, as clemency and readiness to forgive.

What is impossible by the nature of things is not confirmed by any law.