Quotes By Quintilian

When defeat is inevitable, it is wisest to yield.

While we are examining into everything we sometimes find truth where we least expected it.

Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish.

It is much easier to try one's hand at many things than to concentrate one's powers on one thing.

A liar should have a good memory.

In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.

Though ambition itself be a vice, yet it is often times the cause of virtues.

A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.

While we are making up our minds as to when we shall begin, the opportunity is lost.

For the mind is all the easier to teach before it is set.

The prosperous can not easily form a right idea of misery.

It is fitting that a liar should be a man of good memory.

Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly.

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.

We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.

That which prematurely arrives at perfection soon perishes.

Forbidden pleasures alone are loved immoderately; when lawful, they do not excite desire.

Our minds are like our stomaches; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetite.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.

For it would have been better that man should have been born dumb, nay, void of all reason, rather than that he should employ the gifts of Providence to the destruction of his neighbor.

Whilst we deliberate how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it.

A laugh, if purchased at the expense of propriety, costs too much.

Where evil habits are once settled, they are more easily broken than mended.

God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.

Nothing is more dangerous to men than a sudden change of fortune.

Fear of the future is worse than one's present fortune.

Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.

He who speaks evil only differs from his who does evil in that he lacks opportunity.

The pretended admission of a fault on our part creates an excellent impression.