Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
QuintilianRead
To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man.
Interpretation
Using vulgar language should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, as it diminishes one's honor.
Quintilian emphasizes the importance of maintaining one's dignity and honor through language. He suggests that swearing is a mark of lack of restraint and respectability, and should only be employed in extreme circumstances where it may be deemed necessary for emphasis or emotional expression.
In practice
In a speech about maintaining decorum in public discourse.
Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
As regards parents, I should like to see them as highly educated as possible, and I do not restrict this remark to fathers alone.
Whilst we deliberate how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it.
A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.
An evil-speaker differs from an evil-doer only in the want of opportunity.
It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.
Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.
But the forces of evil have not abdicated. The malevolent ghosts of hatred are resurgent with a fury and a boldness that are as astounding as they are nauseating: ethnic conflicts, religious riots, anti-Semitic incidents here, there, and everywhere. What is wrong with these morally degenerate people that they abuse their freedom, so recently won?
My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.
I don't have any authority to talk about the domestic policies of America. But as an outsider, I am mystified by the fact that you are encouraged to buy a gun, but if you use it for the purpose that it is expressly designed for, you get the death penalty. That aspect of America is kind of mystifying.
Men will find that they can ... avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides by united action.
I was not born for one corner. The whole world is my native land.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.