Plutarch Quotes

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The old proverb was now made good, "the mountain had brought forth a mouse."

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
Ingratitude towards great and excellent men are common in popular governments.

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone."

Plutarch
Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Plutarch
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."

Plutarch
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?

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
When the candles are out all women are fair.

Plutarch
Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
Like the man who threw a stone at a bitch, but hit his step-mother, on which he exclaimed, "Not so bad!"

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
That proverbial saying, "Ill news goes quick and far."

Plutarch
It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly, which has no ears.

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
Fate, however, is to all appearance more unavoidable than unexpected.

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
Remember what Simonides said,—that he never repented that he had held his tongue, but often that he had spoken.

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
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."

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
It is indeed desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

Plutarch
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?"

Plutarch
Xenophon says that there is no sound more pleasing than one's own praises.

Plutarch
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.

Plutarch
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."

Plutarch