I wish it, I command it. Let my will take the place of a reason.
—Juvenal
Topics: Motivation
Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.
—Juvenal
Topics: Sports
The short bloom of our brief and narrow life flies far away. While we are calling for flowers and wine and woman, old age is upon us.
—Juvenal
Topics: Age, Aging
Seldom do people discern
Eloquence under a threadbare cloak.
—Juvenal
Topics: Poverty
Vice can deceive under the shadow and guise of virtue.
—Juvenal
Topics: Vice
Bad men hate sin through fear of punishment; good men hate sin through their love of virtue.
—Juvenal
Topics: Sin
Look around the habitable world: how few know their own good, or knowing it, pursue.
—Juvenal
Topics: Helping, Career
Nature and wisdom always say the same.
—Juvenal
Topics: Nature
Hold it the greatest sin to prefer existence to honor, and for the sake of life to lose the reasons for living.
—Juvenal
Topics: Existence
No man ever arrived suddenly at the summit of vice.
—Juvenal
Topics: Vice
We are too quick to imitate depraved examples.
—Juvenal
Topics: Example
Censure pardons the ravens, but rebukes the doves.
—Juvenal
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
—Juvenal
Topics: Punishment
Revenge is the abject pleasure of an abject mind.
—Juvenal
Topics: One liners, Revenge, Vengeance
It is unmistakable madness to live in poverty only to die rich.
—Juvenal
Topics: Poverty
The examples of vice at home corrupt us more quickly and easily than others, since they steal into our minds under the highest authority.
—Juvenal
Topics: Home
A man who has nothing can whistle in a robber’s face.
—Juvenal
Topics: The Poor, Poverty
No other protection is wanting, provided you are under the guidance ot prudence.
—Juvenal
Topics: Prudence
All things may be bought in Rome with money.
—Juvenal
Topics: Cities, City Life
We do not commonly find men of superior sense amongst those of the highest fortune.
—Juvenal
Topics: Wealth, Men
From where can your authority and license as a parent come from, when you who are old, do worse things?
—Juvenal
Topics: Parents, Parenting
Whenever fortune wishes to joke, she lifts people from what is humble to the highest extremity of affairs.
—Juvenal
A third heir seldom enjoys what has been dishonestly acquired.
—Juvenal
Topics: Inheritance
The love of money grows as the money itself grows.
—Juvenal
Topics: Money
Who can all sense of others’ ills escape, is but a brute, at best, in human shape.
—Juvenal
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
—Juvenal
Topics: Age, Aging
Many commit the same crime with a different destiny; one bears a cross as the price of his villainy, another wears a crown.
—Juvenal
Topics: Crime, Criminals
Integrity is praised and then left out in the cold.
—Juvenal
Topics: Integrity
They whose sole bliss is eating can give but that one brutish reason why they live.
—Juvenal
Topics: Diet
Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind.
—Juvenal
Topics: Revenge, Anger, Open-mindedness
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
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Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) Roman Stoic Philosopher
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