Boethius Men Quotations

A man content to go to heaven alone will never go to heaven.

Wretched men cringe before tyrants who have no power, the victims of their trivial hopes and fears. They do not realise that anger is hopeless, fear is pointless and desire all a delusion. He whose heart is fickle is not his own master, has thrown away his shield, deserted his post, and he forges the links of the chain that holds him.

In every kind of adversity, the bitterest part of a man's affliction is to remember that he once was happy.

So nothing is ever good or bad unless you think it so, and vice versa. All luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.

For in every ill-turn of fortune the most unhappy sort of unfortunate man is the one who has been happy

In other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is a vice.

No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.

Good men seek it by the natural means of the virtues; evil men, however, try to achieve the same goal by a variety of concupiscences, and that is surely an unnatural way of seeking the good. Don't you agree?

Man is so constituted that he then only excels other things when he knows himself.

...Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like drunk men, know not the road home.

Every man must be content with that glory which he may have at home.