The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable.

Those who are not schooled and practised in truth [who are not honest and upright men] can never manage aright the government, nor yet can those who spend their lives as closet philosophers; because the former have no high purpose to guide their actions, while the latter keep aloof from public life.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.

Not only is the old man twice a child, but also the man who is drunk.

My plainness of speech makes people hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth.

If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.