Marcus Tullius Cicero Thinking Quotations

Let us not listen to those who think we ought to be angry with our enemies, and who believe this to be great and manly. Nothing is so praiseworthy, nothing so clearly shows a great and noble soul, as clemency and readiness to forgive.

If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.

for the mere act of thinking a course expedient, when it is morally wrong, is demoralizing.

No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good.

The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs.

Vivere est cogitare. (To think is to live)

Whatever that be which thinks, understands, wills, and acts, it is something celestial and divine.

Each part of life has its own pleasures. Each has its own abundant harvest, to be garnered in season. We may grow old in body, but we need never grow old in mind and spirit. No one is as old as to think he or she cannot live one more year.

If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.

No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year.

Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.

I have never yet known a poet who did not think himself super-excellent.

Come now: Do we really think that the gods are everywhere called by the same names by which they are addressed by us? But the gods have as many names as there are languages among humans. For it is not with the gods as with you: you are Velleius wherever you go, but Vulcan is not Vulcan in Italy and in Africa and in Spain.

To disregard what the world thinks of us is not only arrogant but utterly shameless. [Lat., Negligere quid de se quisque sentiat, non solum arrogantis est, sed etiam omnino dissoluti.]

Man was born for two things--thinking and acting.

It is graceful in a man to think and to speak with propriety, to act with deliberation, and in every occurrence of life to find out and persevere in the truth. On the other hand, to be imposed upon, to mistake, to falter, and to be deceived, is as ungraceful as to rave or to be insane.

Tomorrow will give us something to think about

In fact the whole passion ordinarily termed love (and heaven help me if I can think of any other term to apply to it) is of such exceeding triviality that I see nothing that I think comparable with it.

If anyone cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of feeling at all. From the enduring wonder of the heavens flows all grace and power. If anyone thinks it is mindless then he himself must be out of his mind.

Let us assume that entertainment is the sole end of reading; even so I think you would hold that no mental employment is so broadening to the sympathies or so enlightening to the understanding. Other pursuits belong not to all times, all ages, all conditions; but this gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success, and offers a haven of consolation to failure. Through the night-watches, on all our journeyings, and in our hours of ease, it is our unfailing companion.

There is no one so old as to not think they may live a day longer.

This excessive licence, which the anarchists think is the only true freedom, provides the stock, as it were, from which a tyrant grows.

Who can love the man he fears. or by who he thinks he is himself feared?