"Compassion and shame come over one who considers……" — Pliny the Elder
"Compassion and shame come over one who considers how precarious is the origin of the proudest of living beings: often the smell of a lately extinguished lamp is enough to cause a miscarriage. And to think that from such a frail beginning a tyrant or butcher may be born! You who trust in your physical strength, who embrace the gifts of fortune and consider yourself not their ward but their son, you who have a domineering spirit, you who consider yourself a god as soon as success swells your breast, think how little could have destroyed you!"
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Pliny the Elder
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71 Quotes by Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder has 71 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.
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The best kind of wine is that which is most pleasant to him who drinks it.
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Amid the sufferings of life on earth, suicide is God's best gift to man.
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The largest land animal is the elephant, and it is the nearest to man in intelligence: it understands the language…
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Suicide is a privilege of man which deity does not possess.
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There is, to be sure, no evil without something good.
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When collapse is imminent, the little rodents flee.
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The brain is the highest of the organs in position, and it is protected by the vault of the head;…
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His only fault is that he has no fault.
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The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.
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The most disgraceful cause of the scarcity [of remedies] is that even those who know them do not want to…
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The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least…
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More Beginning Quotes
This quote is filed under Beginning Quotes,
one of 4,628 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our…
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Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came…
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A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole…
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The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not…
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But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place…
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When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men…
— Chinua Achebe
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The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'
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Beauty is about perception, not about make-up. I think the beginning of all beauty is knowing and liking oneself. You…
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The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.
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It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
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Begin - to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.
— Marcus Aurelius
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India saw from the beginning, and, even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance, she never…
— Sri Aurobindo
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