Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

Over time, you accumulate a lot of life material.

Our children will be as wise as we are and will establish in the fullness of time those things not yet ripe for establishment

I've known and seen a lot of things over my years.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child.

Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live as a child.

The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

Wisdom loves the children of men, but she prefers those who come through foolishness to wisdom.

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

We are getting older, and we are getting wiser, and we are getting freer. And when you get the wisdom and the truth, then you get the freedom and you get power, and then look out. Look out.

I hope to always be myself, except more mature and knowing more.

I was a long time learning that wisdom and experience are things apart; that to taste life is not to be confused with understanding what life is really all about.

It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.

A man's age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.

There is no man ... however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man -- so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise -- unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.

The great Roman statesman Cicero observed that, 'Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.' In our ignorance of the values that form part of our history and heritage, we Americans have become perpetual children.

We've forgotten what it's like not to be able to reach the light switch. We've forgotten a lot of the monsters that seemed to livein our room at night. Nevertheless, those memories are still there, somewhere inside us, and can sometimes be brought to the surface by events, sights, sounds, or smells. Children, though, can never have grown-up feelings until they've been allowed to do the growing.

None of us was born knowing or wise; but men become wise by consideration, observation, experience.

…but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.

Tradition, thou art for suckling children, Thou art the enlivening milk for babes, But no meat for men is in thee.