Three Books of Offices, Or Moral Duties: Also His Cato Major, an Essay on Old Age; Lælius, an Essay on Friendship; Paradoxes; Scipio's Dream; and Letter to Quintus on the Duties of a Magistrate

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Harper & brothers, 1878 - 343 pages
 

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Page 240 - GOD ALMIGHTY first planted a garden. And, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures ; it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks.
Page 5 - Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.
Page 204 - Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man's self.
Page 205 - Nay, retire men cannot when they would, neither will they when it were reason, but are impatient of privateness, even in age and sickness, which require the shadow; like old townsmen, that will' be still sitting at their street door, though thereby they offer age to scorn.
Page 205 - Certainly great persons had need to borrow other men's opinions to think themselves happy ; for if they judge by their own feeling, they cannot find it : but if they think with themselves what other men think of them, and that other men would fain be as they are, then they are happy as it were by report, when perhaps they find the contrary within : for they are the first that find their own griefs, though they b>e the last that find their own faults.
Page 273 - He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much : and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.
Page 299 - Lastly, leaving the vulgar arguments, that by learning man excelleth man in that wherein man excelleth beasts; that by learning man ascendeth to the heavens and their motions, where in body he cannot come; and the like; let us conclude with the dignity and excellency of knowledge and learning in that whereunto man's nature doth most aspire; which is immortality or continuance; for to this tendeth generation, and raising of houses and families; to this...
Page 143 - Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life : Cunning is a kind of instinct, that only looks out after our immediate interest and welfare.
Page 302 - Plato, thou reasonest well ! Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality ? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of falling into naught?
Page 301 - For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.

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