Friendship is the only thing in the world concerning the usefulness of which all mankind are agreed.
Probability is the very guide of life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Probability plays a crucial role in decision-making and understanding life's uncertainties.
Cicero’s quote highlights the significance of probability in navigating life’s complexities. It suggests that understanding and applying the principles of chance can aid individuals in making informed decisions, anticipating outcomes, and embracing the uncertainties inherent in life. This perspective calls attention to the importance of rational thinking and statistical reasoning as tools for guiding one’s actions and choices.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on strategic planning, one might say, 'As Cicero said, probability is the very guide of life, which emphasizes the importance of assessing risks.'
More from Marcus Tullius Cicero
All quotes →Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defence can actually be just.
Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.
Nothing contributes to the entertainment of the reader more, than the change of times and the vicissitudes of fortune.
No one has the right to be sorry for himself for a misfortune that strikes everyone.
Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end.
Similar quotes
So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.
Strife and Confusion joined the fight, along with cruel Death, who seized one wounded man while still alive and then another man without a wound, while pulling the feet of one more corpse out from the fight. The clothes Death wore around her shoulders were dyed red with human blood.
The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.
In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.
We all have a responsibility to create a just society
Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.