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The old proverb was now made good, "the mountain had brought forth a mouse."
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It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.
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Ingratitude towards great and excellent men are common in popular governments.
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Anaximander says that men were first produced in fishes, and when they were grown up and able to help themselves were thrown up, and so lived upon the land.
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Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone."
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Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
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To one commending an orator for his skill in amplifying petty matters, Agesilaus said, "I do not think that shoemaker a good workman that makes a great shoe for a little foot."
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By the study of their biographies, we receive each man as a guest into our minds, and we seem to understand their character as the result of a personal acquaintance, because we have obtained from their acts the best and most important means of forming an opinion about them. "What greater pleasure could'st thou gain than this?" What more valuable for the elevation of our own character?
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Yet through Alexander (the Great) Bactria and the Caucasus learned to revere the gods of the Greeks … Alexander established more than seventy cities among savage tribes, and sowed all Asia with Greek magistracies … Egypt would not have its Alexandria, nor Mesopotamia its Seleucia, nor Sogdiana its Prophthasia, nor India its Bucephalia, nor the Caucasus a Greek city, for by the founding of cities in these places savagery was extinguished and the worse element, gaining familiarity with the better, changed under its influence.
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It was the saying of Bion, that though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.
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When the candles are out all women are fair.
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Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.
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Agesilaus was very fond of his children; and it is reported that once toying with them he got astride upon a reed as upon a horse, and rode about the room; and being seen by one of his friends, he desired him not to speak of it till he had children of his own.
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Like the man who threw a stone at a bitch, but hit his step-mother, on which he exclaimed, "Not so bad!"
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Note that the eating of flesh is not only physically against nature, but it also makes us spiritually coarse and gross by reason of satiety and surfeit.
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That proverbial saying, "Ill news goes quick and far."
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It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly, which has no ears.
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For many, as Cranton tells us, and those very wise men, not now but long ago, have deplored the condition of human nature, esteeming life a punishment, and to be born a man the highest pitch of calamity; this, Aristotle tells us, Silenus declared when he was brought captive to Midas.
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Fate, however, is to all appearance more unavoidable than unexpected.
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Cato used to assert that wise men profited more by fools than fools by wise men; for that wise men avoided the faults of fools, but that fools would not imitate the good examples of wise men.
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Let us not wonder if something happens which never was before, or if something doth not appear among us with which the ancients were acquainted.
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Remember what Simonides said,—that he never repented that he had held his tongue, but often that he had spoken.
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What is bigger than an elephant? But this also is become man's plaything, and a spectacle at public solemnities; and it learns to skip, dance, and kneel.
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There were two brothers called Both and Either; perceiving Either was a good, understanding, busy fellow, and Both a silly fellow and good for little, Philip said, "Either is both, and Both is neither."
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Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it.
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It is indeed desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
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Epaminondas is reported wittily to have said of a good man that died about the time of the battle of Leuctra, "How came he to have so much leisure as to die, when there was so much stirring?"
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Xenophon says that there is no sound more pleasing than one's own praises.
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There are two sentences inscribed upon the Delphic oracle, hugely accommodated to the usages of man's life: "Know thyself," 68 and "Nothing too much;" and upon these all other precepts depend.
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To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you."
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Quote of the day
Women and men in the crowd meet and mingle, Yet with itself every soul standeth single.
Alice Cary
Plutarch
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Born:
46
Died:
127
(aged 81)
Bio:
Plutarch was a Greek historian, biographer and essayist, known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. He is classified as a Middle Platonist. Plutarch's surviving works are believed to have been originally written in Koine Greek.
Known for:
Parallel Lives
The Fall of the Roman Republic
On Sparta
The age of Alexander
Makers of Rome, nine lives
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