Apollonius Of Tyana Quotes

I asked questions when I was a stripling, and it is not my business to ask questions now, but to teach people what I have discovered.

Don't keep your good manners to the end another time, but begin with them.

In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing

Just as an individual of pre-eminent worth transforms democracy into a monarchy of the best man, even so the rule of one man, if in all things it has an eye to the common welfare, is democracy.

Every argument is incapable of helping unless it is singular and addressed to a single person. Therefore, one who discourses in any other way presumably does so from love of reputation.

Pythagoras said that the most divine art was that of healing. And if the healing art is most divine, it must occupy itself with the soul as well as with the body; for no creature can be sound so long as the higher part in it is sickly.

I delight to lodge in such temples as are not regularly kept closed. None of the gods reject me; they make me partner of their roof.

All the earth is mine, and I have a right to go all over it and through it.

Festivals cause diseases, since they lighten cares but increase gluttony.

In my travels, which have been wider than ever man yet accomplished, I have seen many, many wild beasts of Arabia and India; but this beast, that is commonly called a Tyrant, I know not how many heads it has, nor if it be crooked of claw, and armed with horrible fangs.

If you have problems of conduct that are difficult and hard to settle, I will furnish you with solutions, for I not only know matters of practice and duty, but I even know them beforehand.

If any man has left us for fear of Nero, I shall not account him a coward; but I shall hail as a philosopher any man who has been superior to this fear, and I shall teach him all I know.

Virtue comes by nature, learning, and practice, and thanks to virtue, all of the aforesaid may deserve approval.

Multicolored stones and paintings, walkways, and theaters are useless in a city unless it also contains wisdom and law. Such things are the subject of wisdom and law, not equivalent to them.

In my judgment, excellence and wealth are direct opposites, since when the one shrinks, the other grows, and when one grows, the other shrinks.

A man must fortify himself and understand that a wise man who yields to laziness or anger or passion or love of drink, or who commits any other action prompted by impulse and inopportune, will probably find his fault condoned; but if he stoops to greed, he will not be pardoned, but render himself odious as a combination of all vices at once.

When I review Xerxes' achievements, I praise him, not for having yoked the Hellespont, but for having crossed it. But I can see that Nero will neither sail through the Isthmus nor complete his digging.

I have not yet learned to keep still.

I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future.