Pliny the Elder Quotes

71 quotes in 840 categories

• With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.
• The best kind of wine is that which is most pleasant to him who drinks it.
• Amid the sufferings of life on earth, suicide is God's best gift to man.
• The largest land animal is the elephant, and it is the nearest to man in intelligence: it understands the language of its country and obeys…
• Suicide is a privilege of man which deity does not possess.
• There is, to be sure, no evil without something good.
• When collapse is imminent, the little rodents flee.
• The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it is protected by the vault of the head; it has no flesh or…
• His only fault is that he has no fault.
• The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.
• The most disgraceful cause of the scarcity [of remedies] is that even those who know them do not want to point them out, as if…
• The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given of all too evil…
• Let honor be to us as strong an obligation as necessity is to others.
• The master's eye is the best fertilizer.
• Our civilization depends largely on paper.
• The only thing man knows instinctively is how to weep.
• The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.
• The leading distinction of magnets is sex... The kind that is found in Troas is black, and of the female sex, and consequently destitute of…
• The lust of avarice as so totally seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they possess their wealth.
• ....shellfish are the prime cause of the decline of morals and the adaptation of an extravagant lifestyle.

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