Quotes about Nero

29 Sourced Quotes

Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.

I'm sure that Nero didn't set fire to Rome. It was the Christian-Bolsheviks who did that, just as the Commune set fire to Paris in 1871 and the Communists set fire to the Reichstag in 1932.

Oscar Wilde, Aristotle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, were all homosexuals. Nero, of course, was, in a public way, in with a boy in Rome.

Nero was wont to say of his master, Seneca, that his style was like mortar without lime.

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
'Which Side Are You On?'
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers.

At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

And you take care, too, Shahara. Remember the lies we tell ourselves to survive seldom bring peace to our souls. (Nero)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

Darkdoom? Darkdoom did this?" Nero was visibly surprised. He placed a hand on his forehead, rubbing his temples. "Oh, why is it always the bald ones?

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers - as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.

In some respects, Nero was ahead of his time. He boiled his drinking water to remove the impurities and cooled it with unsanitary ice to put them back in. He renamed the month of April after himself, calling it Neroneus, but the idea never caught on because April is not Neroneus and there is no use pretending that it is. During his reign of fourteen years, the outlying provinces are said to have prospered. They were farther away.

Nero wasn't worried at all when he heard
the utterance of the Delphic Oracle:
Beware the age of seventy-three.
Plenty of time to enjoy himself still.
He's thirty. The deadline
the god has given him is quite enough
to cope with future dangers.

Constantine P. Cavafy

The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.

The first persecution of the Church took place in the year 67, under Nero, the sixth emperor of Rome.

Thus Nero went up and down Greece and challenged the fiddlers at their trade. Aeropus, a Macedonian king, made lanterns; Harcatius, the king of Parthia, was a mole-catcher; and Biantes, the Lydian, filed needles.

If, as you believe there is an Almighty, Omnipresent, Omniscient God, who created the earth or universe, please let me know, first of all, as to why he created this world. This world which is full of woe and grief, and countless miseries, where not even one person lives in peace....Where is God? What is He doing? Is He getting a diseased pleasure out of it? A Nero! A Genghis Khan! Down with Him!

Of all the difficulties in a state, the temper of a true government most felicifies and perpetuates it; too sudden alterations distemper it. Had Nero tuned his kingdom as he did his harp, his harmony had been more honorable, and his reign more prosperous.

Francis Quarles

I try to know what I need to know. I make sure to know what I want to know. (Nero Wolfe)

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor... Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

What if there is no dirt on Merjack? Oh, I can answer this one. (Omari raised his hand like he was in a classroom, then dropped it to his side.) We all die. (Omari) I just love teenage angst. By the way, chip, there are worse things in life than dying. (Nero) Like what? (Omari) Living as a slave. (Alix)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

Contrast Pilate with the prisoner before him, Jesus. Pilate was deeply concerned with position and power. Jesus cared for none of these things. Which was the richer in all that makes a great personality and true success in life? Contrast Nero, the Roman Emperor, and the prisoner named Paul who was beheaded in Nero's reign. Who was the real pauper, Nero or Paul?

Halford E. Luccock

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus … this, that and the other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot', or 'That Claudius', or 'Claudius the Stammerer', or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius', or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius', am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled.

He [Calvin Coolidge] slept more than any other President, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.

Nero watched the conflagration from the Tower of Maecenas, enraptured by what he called "the beauty of the flames"; then put on his tragedian's costume and sang The Sack of Ilium from beginning to end.

It is not meant to be denied that in a policy of conquest consistency is a dangerous praise, and that Trajan after his fashion yielded in these enterprises more than was reasonable to the effort after external success, and went beyond the rational; but wrong is done to him when his demeanor in the East is referred to blind lust of conquest. He did what Caesar would have done had he lived. His policy is but the other side of that of Nero's statesmen, and the two are as opposite, as they are equally consistent and equally warranted. Posterity has justified more the policy of conquest than that of concession.

Theodor Mommsen

No problem, but just know that no one steals from Nero. He knows who you are and he will hunt you down and make you pay in ways you can't imagine – including this whole brain squeeze thing he does that will leave you with a migraine so bad, you'll wish you could bleed out your eyes to stop the pain. He's nasty that way. (Syn)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

At the age of twelve Nero had shown a lively interest in the arts, particularly music, painting, sculpture, and poetry. Why was nothing done about this?

Footnote

When Paul was taken in chains from his filthy Roman dungeon and beheaded at the order of the opulent madman Nero, two representatives of humanity faced off, one of the best and one of the worst. One lived for prosperity on earth, the other didn't. One now lives in prosperity in heaven, the other doesn't. We remember both men for what they truly were, which is why we name our sons Paul and our dogs Nero.

By the way, you guys seriously screwed up just now. (Nero) We know. (They said in unison.) Yeah, well, what you don't know is how grateful your girl is to you. I just thought you should know that you guys are a hero to her…and she thinks we're all idiots. (Nero)

Sherrilyn Kenyon