Quotes by Statesmen - Page 2

Praise your children openly, reprove them secretly.

William Cecil

I love the name of honor more than I fear death.

Gaius Julius Caesar

I wish that death had spared me until your library had been complete.

Lorenzo de' Medici

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You will find that reason, which always ought to direct mankind, seldom does; but that passions and weaknesses commonly usurp its seat, and rule in its stead.

Philip Dormer Stanhope

True happiness is to understand our duties toward God and man to enjoy the present without anxious dependence on the future not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have which is abundantly sufficient.

Seneca

He is happiest be he king or peasant who finds peace in his home.

Goethe

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.

Francis Bacon

Courage is a scorner of things which inspire fear.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca

The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

Edmund Burke

No passion so effectively robs the mind of its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Edmund Burke

The less one has to do the less time one finds to do it in. One yawns one procrastinates one can do it when one will and therefore one seldom does it at all whereas those who have a great deal of business must buckle to it and then they always find time enough to do it.

Lord Chesterfield

Pain is slight if opinion has added nothing to it; ... in thinking it slight, you will make it slight. Everything depends on opinion. It is according to opinion that we suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.

Seneca

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Divide and rule, the politician cries;Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Know the true value of time snatch seize and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness no laziness no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.

Lord Chesterfield

No one, on his deathbed, ever regretted having been a Catholic.

Thomas More

No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific.

Edmund Burke

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Cæsar) were civil times. But superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government. The master of superstition is the people; and in all superstition wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.

Francis Bacon

Histories make men wise poets witty the mathematics subtile natural philosophy deep morals grave logic and rhetoric able to contend.

Sir Francis Bacon

The virtue of prosperity is temperance the virtue of adversity is fortitude.

Francis Bacon

Love sometimes injures. Friendship always benefits, After friendship is formed you must trust, but before that you must judge.

Seneca

The first petition that we are to make to Almighty God is for a good conscience the next for health of mind and then of body.

Seneca

Oh, what darkness does great prosperity cast over our minds!

Seneca

The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one ... the more active and swift the latter is the further he will go astray.

Francis Bacon

I call architecture 'petrified music'.

Goethe

You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.

Seneca

Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.

Francis Bacon

Humankind is made up of two sexes, women and men. Is it possible for humankind to grow by the improvement of only one part while the other part is ignored? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains that the other half can soar into skies?

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Be above it! Make the world serve your purpose, but do not serve it!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

By gnawing through a dyke even a rat may drown a nation.

Edmund Burke

Every day look at a beautiful picture read a beautiful poem listen to some beautiful music and if possible say some reasonable thing.

Goethe

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We are more often frightened than hurt and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca

He who has great power should use it lightly.

Seneca

But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.

Francis Bacon

If you are surprised at the number of our maladies count our cooks.

Seneca

We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not some books continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, and cities have been decayed and demolished?

Francis Bacon

The best slave is the one who thinks he is free.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am not a ‘wise man,’ nor . . . shall I ever be. And so require not from me that I should be equal to the best, but that I should be better than the wicked. It is enough for me if every day I reduce the number of my vices, and blame my mistakes.

Seneca

Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends never lose a chance to make them.

Francesco Guicciardini

Believe me if you consult philosophy she will persuade you not to lit so long at your counting desk

Seneca

Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others experience.

Otto von Bismarck

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

Bernard M. Baruch

So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honorable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting. All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re travelling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.

Seneca

He who imitates what is evil always goes beyond the example that is set on the contrary he who imitates what is good always falls short.

Francesco Guicciardini

Society is indeed a contract ... it becomes a participant not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Edmund Burke

One who's our friend is fond of us one who's fond of us isn't necessarily our friend.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca

If you would create something,you must be something.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

On Epicurus; He says: "Contended poverty is an honourable estate." Indeed, if it is contented, it is not poverty at all. It is not the man who has little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Seneca

The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.

Seneca

The man who trusts other men will make fewer mistakes than he who distrusts them.

Camillo Di Cavour

The whole earth is the tomb of heroic men and their story is not given only on stone over their clay but abides everywhere without visible symbol woven into the stuff of other mens lives.

Pericles

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

Francis Bacon

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

Francis Bacon

...certain people have good, ordinary blood and others have an animated, lively sort of blood that comes to the face quickly.

Seneca

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

Edmund Burke

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke

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