Quotes from book
Moralia

PlutarchOriginal title Ἠθικά

The Moralia of the 1st-century Greek scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea is an eclectic collection of 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They provide insights into Roman and Greek life, but often are also timeless observations in their own right. Many generations of Europeans have read or imitated them, including Michel de Montaigne and the Renaissance Humanists and Enlightenment philosophers.

“For water continually dropping will wear hard rocks hollow.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Moralia, Of the Training of Children

“Are you not ashamed to mix tame fruits with blood and slaughter? You are indeed wont to call serpents, leopards, and lions savage creatures; but yet yourselves are defiled with blood, and come nothing behind them in cruelty. What they kill is their ordinary nourishment, but what you kill is your better fare.”

Plutarch book Moralia

I, 2
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh

“When the candles are out all women are fair.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Conjugal Precepts
Moralia, Others

“It is a true proverb, that if you live with a lame man, you will learn a limp.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Moralia, Of the Training of Children

“Antiphanes said merrily that in a certain city the cold was so intense that words were congealed as soon as spoken, but that after some time they thawed and became audible; so that the words spoken in winter articulated next summer.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Of Man's Progress in Virtue
Moralia, Others

“Rest gives relish to labour.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Moralia, Of the Training of Children

“He that first started that doctrine, that knavery is the best defense against a knave, was but an ill teacher, advising us to commit wickedness to secure ourselves.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Of Bashfulness; on Zeno
Moralia, Others

“An old doting fool, with one foot already in the grave.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Moralia, Of the Training of Children

“Children are to be won to follow liberal studies by exhortations and rational motives, and on no account to be forced thereto by whipping.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Moralia, Of the Training of Children

“All men whilst they are awake are in one common world; but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Of Superstition.
Attributed to Heraclitus, Frag. 89
Moralia, Others

“He is a fool who leaves things close at hand to follow what is out of reach.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Of Garrulity.
Attributed to Hesiod, Frag. 219
Moralia, Others

“According to the proverb, the best things are the most difficult.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Moralia, Of the Training of Children

“In the beginning, some wild and mischievous beast was killed and eaten, and then some little bird or fish was entrapped. And the love of slaughter, being first experimented and exercised in these, at last passed even to the laboring ox, and the sheep that clothes us, and to the poor cock that keeps the house; until by little and little, unsatiableness being strengthened by use, men came to the slaughter of men, to bloodshed and wars.”

Plutarch book Moralia

II, 4
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh

“For the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy. And then we fancy that the voices it utters and screams forth to us are nothing else but certain inarticulate sounds and noises, and not the several deprecations, entreaties, and pleadings of each of them.”

Plutarch book Moralia

I, 4
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh

“Such men ever, whether they have some business to transact, or have taken upon them some office, or are in some critical conjuncture, put before their eyes the example of noble men, and consider what Plato would have done on the occasion, what Epaminondas would have said, how Lycurgus or Agesilaus would have dealt; that so, adjusting and re-modelling themselves, as it were, at their mirrors, they may correct any ignoble expression, and repress any ignoble passion.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Source: Moralia, How one may be aware of one's progress in virtue, XV

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