Quotes
Quotes about Man
Like the man who threw a stone at a bitch, but hit his step-mother, on which he exclaimed, "Not so bad!"
He was a man, which, as Plato saith, is a very inconstant creature.
I, for my own part, had much rather people should say of me that there neither is nor ever was such a man as Plutarch, than that they should say, "Plutarch is an unsteady, fickle, froward, vindictive, and touchy fellow."
Philip being arbitrator betwixt two wicked persons, he commanded one to fly out of Macedonia and the other to pursue him.
When he was wounded with an arrow in the ankle, and many ran to him that were wont to call him a god, he said smiling, "That is blood, as you see, and not, as Homer saith, ‘such humour as distils from blessed gods.'"
Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone."
He preferred an honest man that wooed his daughter, before a rich man. "I would rather," said Themistocles, "have a man that wants money than money that wants a man."
King Agis said, "The Lacedæmonians are not wont to ask how many, but where the enemy are."
When Eudæmonidas heard a philosopher arguing that only a wise man can be a good general, "This is a wonderful speech," said he; "but he that saith it never heard the sound of trumpets."
Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.
"Young men," said Cæsar, "hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young."
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?"
The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length.
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.
There are two sentences inscribed upon the Delphic oracle, hugely accommodated to the usages of man's life: "Know thyself," and "Nothing too much;" and upon these all other precepts depend.
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."
And when the physician said, "Sir, you are an old man," "That happens," replied Pausanias, "because you never were my doctor."
When one told Plistarchus that a notorious railer spoke well of him, "I 'll lay my life," said he, "somebody hath told him I am dead, for he can speak well of no man living."
Anacharsis said a man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible favours and blessings of Fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.
And Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a manner of computing the proportion of gold in King Hiero's crown by seeing the water flowing over the bathing-stool. He leaped up as one possessed or inspired, crying, "I have found it! Eureka!"
Spintharus, speaking in commendation of Epaminondas, says he scarce ever met with any man who knew more and spoke less.
It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration,--nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.
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.
No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.
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.
