Skip to content

We extol ancient things, regardless of our own times.

Vetera extollimus recentium incuriosi.

Original text (Latin)

Another quote →

Topics

Age

More quotes by Tacitus

It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.

Great empires are not maintained by timidity.

Our magistrates discharge their duties best at the beginning; and fall off toward the end.

Every great example of punishment has in it some injustice, but the suffering individual is compensated by the public good.

A woman after having parted with her virtue will hesitate at nothing.

All Tacitus quotes →

You may also like

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Tacitus (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.