Pliny the Elder Quotations

Cincinnatus was ploughing his four jugera of land upon the Vaticanian Hill, the same that are still known as the Quintian Meadows, when the messenger brought him the dictatorship, finding him, the tradition says, stripped to the work.

...shellfish are the prime cause of the decline of morals and the adaptation of an extravagant lifestyle. Indeed of the whole realm of Nature the sea is in many ways the most harmful to the stomach, with its great variety of dishes and tasty fish.

The graceful tear that streams for others' Man is the weeping animal born to govern all the rest.

We live by reposing trust in each other.

The first (barbers) that entered Italy came out of Sicily and it was in the 454 yeare after the foundation of Rome. Brought in they were by P. Ticinius Mena as Verra doth report for before that time they never cut their hair. The first that was shaven every day was Scipio Africanus, and after cometh Augustus the Emperor who evermore used the razor.

A short death is the sovereign good hap of human life.

Human nature craves novelty.

And that all seas are made calme and still with oile; and therefore the Divers under the water doe spirt and sprinkle it abroad with their mouthes because it dulceth and allaieth the unpleasant nature thereof, and carrieth a light with it.

I think it is the most beautiful and humane thing in the world, so to mingle gravity with pleasure that the one may not sink into melancholy, nor the other rise up into wantonness.

Nature makes us buy her presents at the price of so many sufferings that it is doubtful whether she deserves most the name of parent or stepmother.