If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

In a philosophical dispute, he gains most who is defeated, since he learns most.

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.

I would rather be first in a little Iberian village than second in Rome.

Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

We begin every act of choice and avoidance from pleasure, and it is to pleasure that we return using our experience of pleasure as the criterion of every good thing.