I pray as follows: May justice reign, may the laws not be broken, may the wise men be poor, and the poor men rich, without sin.
Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.
The gods do not need sacrifices, so what might one do to please them? Acquire wisdom, it seems to me, and do all the good in one's power to those humans who deserve it.
O ye gods, grant unto me to have little and to want nothing.
If any man has left us for fear of Nero, I shall not account him a coward; but I shall hail as a philosopher any man who has been superior to this fear, and I shall teach him all I know.
O thou Sun, send me as far over the earth as is my pleasure and thine, and may I make the acquaintance of good men, but never hear anything of bad ones, nor they of me.
Don't keep your good manners to the end another time, but begin with them.
Never may a man prone to believe scandal be a despot or a popular leader! Under his guidance, democracy itself will be despotism.
All the earth is mine, and I have a right to go all over it and through it.
I have not yet learned to keep still.
Nero may have understood how to tune his cithern, but he disgraced his imperial office both by slackening and by tightening the strings.
You need not wonder at my knowing all human languages; for, to tell you the truth, I also understand all the secrets of human silence.
If you have problems of conduct that are difficult and hard to settle, I will furnish you with solutions, for I not only know matters of practice and duty, but I even know them beforehand.
I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future.
It is the duty of the law-giver to deliver to the many the instructions of whose truth he has persuaded himself.
It is at the time of dawn that we must commune with the gods.
As soldiers need not only courage but tactics also, so does a philosopher need not only courage and philosophy but discernment also, to tell what his right time of dying is - so that he neither seek it nor flee it.
The gods, as they are beneficent, if they find anyone who is healthy and whole and unscarred by vice, will send him away, surely, after crowning him, not with golden crowns, but with all sorts of blessings.
I asked questions when I was a stripling, and it is not my business to ask questions now, but to teach people what I have discovered.
A man must fortify himself and understand that a wise man who yields to laziness or anger or passion or love of drink, or who commits any other action prompted by impulse and inopportune, will probably find his fault condoned; but if he stoops to greed, he will not be pardoned, but render himself odious as a combination of all vices at once.
