Tacitus Quotes

66 Sourced Quotes

Benefits received are a delight to us as long as we think we can requite them; when that possibility is far exceeded, they are repaid with hatred instead of gratitude.

Tacitus
So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.

Tacitus
More faults are often committed while we are trying to oblige than while we are giving offense.

Tacitus
War will of itself discover and lay open the hidden and rankling wounds of the victorious party.

Tacitus
So true is it that all transactions of preeminent importance are wrapt in doubt and obscurity; while some hold for certain facts the most precarious hearsays, others turn facts into falsehood; and both are exaggerated by posterity.

Tacitus
Style, like the human body, is specially beautiful when the veins are not prominent and the bones cannot be counted.

Tacitus
Their shields are black, their bodies dyed. They choose dark nights for battle, and, by the dread and gloomy aspect of their death-like host, strike terror into the foe, who can never confront their strange and almost infernal appearance.

Tacitus
All ancient history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others.

Tacitus
Great eloquence, like fire, grows with its material; it becomes fiercer with movement, and brighter as it burns.

Tacitus
They even say that an altar dedicated to Ulysses, with the addition of the name of his father, Laertes, was formerly discovered on the same spot, and that certain monuments and tombs with Greek inscriptions, still exist on the borders of Germany and Rhaetia.

Tacitus
Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.

Tacitus
Some might consider him as too fond of fame; for the desire for glory clings even to the best men longer than any other passion.

Tacitus
To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Tacitus
Good habits are here more effectual than good laws elsewhere.

Tacitus
He [Nerva] has united things long incompatible, the principate and liberty.

Tacitus
The desire of glory is the last infirmity cast off even by the wise.

Tacitus
No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.

Tacitus
It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.

Tacitus
To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire, they make a wilderness and call it peace.

Tacitus
Those whose habit it is to admire what is forbidden ought to know that there can be great men even under bad emperors.

Tacitus
There was more courage in bearing trouble than in escaping from it; the brave and the energetic cling to hope, even in spite of fortune; the cowardly and the indolent are hurried by their fears,' said Plotius Firmus, Roman Praetorian Guard.

Tacitus
Every great example of punishment has in it some injustice, but the suffering individual is compensated by the public good.

Tacitus
Under Domitian not the smallest part of one's misery was to see and be seen.

Tacitus
It is part of human nature to hate the man you have hurt.

Tacitus
What is today supported by precedents will hereafter become a precedent.

Tacitus