Cicero Quotes on Virtue
Cicero's De Officiis (44 BC) — composed for his son Marcus during the political crisis of Cicero's last year — is the most influential ancient work on the cardinal virtues and the most widely read Latin philosophical book of the medieval and early modern periods. The framework adapts the Stoicism of Panaetius to Roman political experience: the four cardinal virtues (wisdom, justice, courage, moderation) are the proper expression of the rational nature human beings share with the gods, and the work systematically analyzes the apparent conflicts between the honourable (honestum) and the expedient (utile) that arise in political and commercial life and that — Cicero insists, against any merely prudential ethics — are at bottom only apparent. The political context Cicero himself faced supplies the implicit standard against which the abstract analysis is to be measured.
Quotes
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Attributed to Cicero:
“Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offence.”
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Attributed to Cicero:
“What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage.”
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Attributed to Cicero:
“I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.”
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“We should never take pleasure in causing pain to others, even to those who have wronged us, but rather strive to do good to all.”
Wikiquote -
“That which is most excellent, and is most to be desired by all happy, honest and healthy-minded men, is dignified leisure.”
Pro Publio Sestio ; Chapter XLV -
“A grateful mind is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the other virtues.”
As quoted in Great Thoughts from Latin Authors (1884), by Craufurd Tait Ramage, p. 32 -
“And what can be more divine than the exhalations of the earth, which affect the human soul so as to enable her to predict the future ? And could the hand of time evaporate such a virtue? Do you suppose you are talking of some kind of wine or salted meat ?”
De Divinatione–On Divination(44 BC) | Book I, Chapter III