Pliny The Elder Quotes

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.

Pliny The Elder

Author

How innocent, how happy, how truly delightful, even, would life be if we were to desire nothing but what is to be found upon the face of the earth: in a word, nothing but what is provided ready to our hands!

Pliny The Elder

Author

The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.

Pliny The Elder

Author

The lust of avarice as so totally seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they possess their wealth.

Pliny The Elder

Author

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

Pliny The Elder

Author

What is there more unruly than the sea, with its winds, its tornadoes, and its tempests? And yet in what department of her works has Nature been more seconded by the ingenuity of man than in this, by his inventions of sails and of oars?

Pliny The Elder

Author

Hardly can it be judged whether it be better for mankind to believe that the gods have regard of us, or that they have none, considering that some men have no respect and reverence for the gods, and others so much that their superstition is a shame to them.

Pliny The Elder

Author

Our forefathers regarded as a prodigy the passage of the Alps: first by Hannibal and, more recently, by the Cimbri; but at the present day, these very mountains are cut asunder to yield us a thousand different marbles; promontories are thrown open to the sea; and the face of Nature is being everywhere reduced to a level.

Pliny The Elder

Author

Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.

Pliny The Elder

Author

The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.

Pliny The Elder

Author

To seek after any shape of God, and to assign a form and image to Him, is a proof of man's folly. For God, whosoever he be (if haply there be any other but the world itself), and in what part soever resident, all sense He is, all sight, all hearing: He is the whole of the life and of the soul, all of Himself.

Pliny The Elder

Author

From the end spring new beginnings.

Pliny The Elder

Author

Home is where the heart is.

Pliny The Elder

Author

No mortal man, moreover is wise at all moments.

Pliny The Elder

Author

The world and that which, by another name, men have thought good to call Heaven (under the compass of which all things are covered), we ought to believe, in all reason, to be a divine power, eternal, immense, without beginning, and never to perish.

Pliny The Elder

Author

Truth comes out in wine.

Pliny The Elder

Author

It is generally much more shameful to lose a good reputation than never to have acquired it.

Pliny The Elder

Author

There is always something new out of Africa.

Pliny The Elder

Author

Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen.

Pliny The Elder

Author

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. Hope is the dream of a waking man.

Pliny The Elder

Author

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