Browse 6 quotations connecting Cicero with Life, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include Cato on Old Age, Laelius on Friendship, Tusculan Disputations. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include Cato on Old Age, Laelius on Friendship, Tusculan Disputations.
“No one is so old as to think that he may not live a year.”
Even late in life people naturally continue to imagine a future, which helps explain why worthwhile work and planning do not simply stop with age.
Source note: Cato on Old Age, Shuckburgh translation, in a passage about older people planting for those who come after them.
“For of course rashness is the note of youth, prudence of old age.”
The contrast assigns different characteristic strengths to stages of life, valuing experience for the restraint and judgment it can develop.
Source note: Cato on Old Age, Shuckburgh translation.
“The course of life is fixed, and nature admits of its being run but in one way, and only once.”
Each stage of life occurs only once, so wisdom includes accepting its appropriate strengths instead of endlessly trying to restore an earlier stage.
Source note: Cato on Old Age, Shuckburgh translation, in Cicero’s discussion of the distinctive advantages of each season of life.
“You should use what you have, and whatever you may chance to be doing, do it with all your might.”
Capability should be judged by the resources actually available now, then used fully instead of being measured only against a younger or stronger self.
Source note: Cato on Old Age, in Cicero’s answer to the complaint that age reduces physical strength.
“You might just as well take the sun out of the sky as friendship from life; for the immortal gods have given us nothing better or more delightful.”
Friendship is treated not as an optional ornament but as one of the basic goods that makes ordinary life worth inhabiting.
Source note: Laelius on Friendship, Shuckburgh translation.
“For I now call a freedom from anxiety a security, on which freedom a happy life depends.”
Cicero treats inner security as freedom from destabilizing anxiety, making mental steadiness an important condition of a genuinely happy and self-directed life.
Source note: Tusculan Disputations, Book V; Cicero discusses security as freedom from anxiety within a larger argument about virtue, stability, and the conditions of happiness.