Best 25 quotes of Pliny The Younger on MyQuotes

Everyone is prejudiced in favor of his own powers of discernment.

Fear is a feeling that is stronger than love.

For however often a man may receive an obligation from you, if you refuse a request, all former favors are effaced by this one denial.

Glory ought to be the consequence, not the motive of our actions.

He [Pliny the Elder] used to say that 'no book [etc] was so bad but some good might be got out of it'.

Honor puts us under an obligation as binding as necessity is for other people.

However often you may have done them a favour, if you once refuse they forget everything except your refusal.

In the pleading of cases nothing pleases so much as brevity.

It is difficult to retain what you may have learned unless you should practice it. -Difficile est tenere quae acceperis nisi exerceas

It is wonderful how the mind is stirred and quickened into activity by brisk bodily exercise.

Let us strive the more earnestly therefore to lengthen out our span of life-- life that is poured out like water and falls as the leaf-- if not by action (the means to which lie in another's power), yet in any case by study and research; and since it is not granted us to live long, let us transmit to posterity some memorial that we have at least lived.

Never do a thing concerning the rectitude of which you are in doubt.

Objects which are usually the motives of our travels by land and by sea are often overlooked and neglected if they lie under our eye.

Perhaps you will ask whether I can raise these three millions without difficulty. Well, nearly all my capital is invested in land, but I have some money out at interest and I can borrow without any trouble.

So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.

The erection of a monument is superfluous, our memory will endure if our lives have deserved it.

The highest of characters is his who is as ready to pardon the moral errors of mankind as if he were every day guilty of them himself; and as cautious of committing a fault as if he never forgave one.

There is no book so bad that it is not profitable in some part. -Nullus est liber tam malus ut non aliqua parte prosit

Too much polishing weakens rather than improves a work.

Unfinished paintings are more admired than the finished because the artist's actual thoughts are left visible.

Deus est mortali iuvare mortalem.

In the darkness you could hear the crying of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. Some prayed for help. Others wished for death. But still more imagined that there were no Gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness.

It is not true that the world is too tired and exhausted to produce anything worth praising.

Nullus est liber tam malus ut non aliqua parte prosit - There is no book so bad that it is not profitable on some part.

there may be greater glory in obedience where the desire to obey is less