Pliny the Younger Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.

Pliny the Younger
He [Pliny the Elder] used to say that "no book was so bad but some good might be got out of it."

Pliny the Younger
That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.

Pliny the Younger
By then day had broken everywhere, but here it was still night-no, more than night.

Pliny the Younger
Never do a thing concerning the rectitude of which you are in doubt.

Pliny the Younger
It is wonderful how the mind is stirred and quickened into activity by brisk bodily exercise.

Pliny the Younger
So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.

Pliny the Younger
Glory ought to be the consequence, not the motive of our actions.

Pliny the Younger
Let us strive the more earnestly therefore to lengthen out our span of life-- life that is poured out like water and falls as the leaf-- if not by action (the means to which lie in another's power), yet in any case by study and research; and since it is not granted us to live long, let us transmit to posterity some memorial that we have at least lived.

Pliny the Younger
Literature is both my joy and my comfort: it can add to every happiness and there is no sorrow it cannot console.

Pliny the Younger
I contemplate the sort of friend, the sort of man I am now without. He completed his sixty-seventh year, a reasonable age for the sturdiest of us; I acknowledge that. He escaped from an interminable illness; I acknowledge that. He died with his dear ones surviving him, and at a time of prosperity for the state, which was dearer to him than all else; that too I acknowledge. Yet I lament his death as though he were young and in glowing health. I lament it—you can consider me a weakling in this—on my own account, for I have lost the witness, guardian and teacher of my life.

Pliny the Younger
It is a man's pleasures…which tell us most about his true worth, his moral excellence, and his self-control. No one is so dissolute that his occupations lack all semblance of seriousness; it is our leisure moments which betray us.

Pliny the Younger
Modestus said of Regulus that he was "the biggest rascal that walks upon two legs."

Pliny the Younger
You say you have nothing to write about. Well, you can at least write about that—or else simply the phrase our elders used to start a letter with: 'If you are well, well and good; I am well.' That will do for me—it is all that matters.

Pliny the Younger
For this is not a digression from it, but the work itself.

Pliny the Younger
Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye... We put off from time to time going and seeing what we know we have an opportunity of seeing when we please.

Pliny the Younger
There is nothing to write about, you say. Well, then, write and let me know just this,—that there is nothing to write about; or tell me in the good old style if you are well. That's right. I am quite well.

Pliny the Younger
This expression of ours, "Father of a family."

Pliny the Younger