Petronius Quotes

No man on earth may look on forbidden things as you have done and escape punishment. Especially here, a land so infested with divinity that one might meet a god more easily than a man. ~ Petronius

Wisdom and beauty form a very rare combination. ~ Petronius

if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky (and other Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century), the ancient Greek dramatists, theElizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its "message" which I got first and which I will never shake off. ~ Henry Miller

We marched him to the turfy shack where he lived with his parents and while the youth sulked Petronius Longus put the whole moral issue in succinct terms to them: Ollia's father was a legionary veteran who had served in Egypt and Syria for over twenty years until he left with double pay, three medals, and a diploma that made Ollia legitimate; he now ran a boxers' training school where he was famous for his high-minded attitude and his fighters were notorious for their loyalty to him ... The old fisherman was a toothless, hapless, faithless cove you would not trust too near you with a filleting knife, but whether from fear or simple cunning he co-operated eagerly. The lad agreed to marry the girl and since Silvia would never abandon Ollia here, we decided that the fisherboy had to come back with us to Rome. His relations looked impressed by this result. We accepted it as the best we could achieve. ~ Lindsey Davis

Beauty and wisdom are rarely conjoined. ~ Petronius

What the Gods want happens soon ~ Petronius

It is fear that first brought gods into the world. ~ Petronius

Leave your home, O youth, and seek out alien shores. A wider range of life has been ordained for you. ~ Petronius

I know, 0 Caesar, that thou art awaiting my arrival with impatience, that thy true heart of a friend is yearning day and night for me. I know that thou art ready to cover me with gifts, make me prefect of the pretorian guards, and command Tigellinus to be that which the gods made him, a mule-driver in those lands which thou didst inherit after poisoning Domitius. Pardon me, however, for I swear to thee by Hades, and by the shades of thy mother, thy wife, thy brother, and Seneca, that I cannot go to thee. Life is a great treasure. I have taken the most precious jewels from that treasure, but in life there are many things which I cannot endure any longer. Do not suppose, I pray, that I am offended because thou didst kill thy mother, thy wife, and thy brother; that thou didst burn Eome and send to Erebus all the honest men in thy dominions. No, grandson of Chronos. Death is the inheritance of man; from thee other deeds could not have been expected. But to destroy one's ear for whole years with thy poetry, to see thy belly of a Domitius on slim legs whirled about in a Pyrrhic dance; to hear thy music, thy declamation, thy doggerel verses, wretched poet of the suburbs, - is a thing surpassing my power, and it has roused in me the wish to die. Eome stuffs its ears when it hears thee; the world reviles thee. I can blush for thee no longer, and I have no wish to do so. The howls of Cerberus, though resembling thy music, will be less offensive to me, for I have never been the friend ~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

Outward looks are not enough,
Beauty is not common stuff-
Of merriment it is compact,
Playful grace in every act,
Witty laughter, laughing wit:
These are things that go with it,
These surpass the simple graces
In beautiful and silly faces.
Art is beauty; and I say:
Take the lovely fool away!-
If she strips from foot to head
And doesn't ask me into bed. ~ Petronius

It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining. ~ David Hume

Sometimes the buzz of reading about others eating comes from the voyeuristic thrill of seeing how the other half lives: the gold leaf and truffles or - in the case of Trimalchio's feast in Petronius' 'Satyricon' - the dormice and honey. ~ Bee Wilson

In every human undertaking there is something which is not in our power and does not come within our calculations; the wish to win this for oneself is the origin of the gods. "Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor" is an old and true saying of Petronius. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

O Petronius, thou hast seen what endurance and comfort that religion gives in misfortune, how much patience and courage before death; so come and see how much happiness it gives in ordinary, common days of life. People thus far did not know a God whom man could love, hence they did not love one another; and from that came their misfortune, for as light comes from the sun, so does happiness come from love....Thou didst say to me that our teaching was an enemy of life; and I answer thee now, that, if from the beginning of this letter I had been repeating only the three words, 'I am happy!' I could not have expressed my happiness to thee. To this thou wilt answer, that my happiness is Lygia. True, my friend. Because I love her immortal soul, and because we both love each other in Christ; for such love there is no separation, no deceit, no change, no old age, no death. For, when youth and beauty pass, when our bodies wither and death comes, love will remain, for the spirit remains. Before my eyes were open to the light I was ready to burn my own house even, for Lygia's sake; but now I tell thee that I did not love her, for it was Christ who first taught me to love. In Him is the source of peace and happiness. It is not I who say this, but reality itself. Compare thy own luxury, my friend, lined with alarm, thy delights, not sure of a morrow, thy orgies, with the lives of Christians, and thou wilt find a ready answer. But, to compare better, come to our mountains with the odor of ~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

He has gone over to the majority. ~ Petronius

Heaven is equally distant everywhere. ~ Petronius

One good turn deserves another. ~ Petronius

Women are one and all a set of vultures. ~ Petronius

Outward beauty is not enough; to be attractive a woman must use words, wit, playfulness, sweet-talk, and laughter to transcend the gifts of nature. ~ Petronius

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die. ~ Petronius

Just as dumb creatures are snared by food, human beings would not be caught unless they had a nibble of hope. ~ Petronius

One good turns deserve another ~ Petronius

The favor for the favor or One hand washes the other. ~ Petronius

While fortune lasts you will see your friend's face. ~ Petronius

A doctor is nothing more than consolation for the spirit. ~ Petronius

from Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon, 'For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a jar. When the boys asked her, "Sibyl, what do you want?" she said, "I want to die." '" Long ~ Lauren Groff

I said everything that a painful swelling in one's libido tells one to say. ~ Petronius

Petronius was surely right in saying Fear made the gods. In primitive times fear of the unknown was normal; gratitude to an unknown was impossible. ~ J.M. Robertson

Can't you see that I'm only advising you to beg yourself not to be so dumb? ~ Petronius

A huge dog, tied by a chain, was painted on the wall and over it was written in capital letters 'Beware of the dog.' ~ Petronius

So the starry sky turns round like a millstone, always bringing some trouble, and men being born or dying. ~ Petronius

He that has a penny in his purse, is worth a penny: Have and you shall be esteemed. ~ Petronius

A physician is nothing but a consoler of the mind. ~ Petronius