Apollonius of Tyana

“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.”

“I have not yet learned to keep still.”

“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.”

“O thou Sun, send me as far over the earth as is my pleasure and thine, and may I make the acquaintance of good men, but never hear anything of bad ones, nor they of me.”

“My ideal is for each to do what he knows and what he can.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I asked certain rich men if they felt embittered. 'How could we not?' they said. So I asked them what caused this anguish. They blamed their wealth.”

“It is a true man's part not to err, but it is also noble of a man to perceive his error.”

“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.”

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

“It is the duty of the law-giver to deliver to the many the instructions of whose truth he has persuaded himself.”

“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.”

“I pray as follows: May justice reign, may the laws not be broken, may the wise men be poor, and the poor men rich, without sin.”