Top 500 Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

402. “If wisdom be attainable, let us not only win but enjoy it.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

403. “The gardener plants trees, not one berry of which he will ever see: and shall not a public man plant laws, institutions, government, in short, under the same conditions?”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

404. “Inhumanity is harmful in every age. – Inhumanitas omni aetate molesta est.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

405. “What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

406. “Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

407. “By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

408. “Morals today are corrupted by our worship of riches.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

409. “Let art, then, imitate nature, find what she desires, and follow as she directs. For in invention nature is never last, education never first; rather the beginnings of things arise from natural talent, and ends are reached by discipline.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

410. “Who doesn’t know that the first law of history is not to dare to say anything false, and the second is not to refrain from saying anything true?”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

412. “They who say that we should love our fellow-citizens but not foreigners, destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, with which benevolence and justice would perish forever.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

413. “Nothing dries sooner than a tear.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

414. “A liar is not believed even though he tell the truth.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

415. “Law stands mute in the midst of arms.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

416. “Enmity is anger watching the opportunity for revenge.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

417. “Death is not natural for a state as it is for a human being, for whom death is not only necessary, but frequently even desirable.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

418. “Old age is by nature rather talkative.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

419. “So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

420. “Freedom is a man’s natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

421. “Summer lasts not for ever; seasons succeed each other.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

422. “We must not only obtain Wisdom: we must enjoy her.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

423. “Persistence in a single view has never been regarded as a merit in political leaders.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

424. “To be endowed with strength by nature, to be actuated by the powers of the mind, and to have a certain spirit almost divine infused into you.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

425. “For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

426. “It is a great thing to know your vices.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

427. “The eyes like sentinel occupy the highest place in the body.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

428. “As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

429. “Were floods of tears to be unloosed In tribute to my grief, The doves of Noah ne’er had roost Nor found an olive-leaf.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

430. “The leaders should all relate to this principle: the governed must be as happy as possible.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

431. “The good life is impossible without a good state; and there is no greater blessing than a well-ordered state.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

432. “I hate all children of precocious talent.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

433. “Fortune is not only blind herself, but blinds the people she has embraced.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

434. “All I can do is to urge on you to regard friendship as the greatest thing in the world; for there is nothing which so fits in with our nature, or is so exactly what we want in prosperity or adversity.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

435. “There is pleasure in calm remembrance of a past sorrow.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

436. “Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

437. “To give and receive advice – the former with freedom, and yet without bitterness, the latter with patience and without irritation – is peculiarly appropriate to geniune friendship.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

438. “Great is our admiration of the orator who speaks with fluency and discretion.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

439. “I look upon the pleasure we take in a garden as one of the most innocent delights in human life.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

440. “The name of peace is sweet and the thing itself good, but between peace and slavery there is the greatest difference.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

441. “Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

442. “Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

443. “It is not only arrogant, but it is profligate, for a man to disregard the world’s opinion of himself.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

444. “Let flattery, the handmaid of the vices, be far removed .”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

445. “Justice extorts no reward, no kind of price; she is sought, therefore, for her own sake.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

446. “In everything, satiety closely follows the greatest pleasures.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

447. “A community is like the ones who govern it.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

448. “Be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which and be pointed out by your finger.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

449. “Always the same thing.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

450. “Courage is virtue which champions the cause of right.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero