The prosperous can not easily form a right idea of misery.

- Quintilian

Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.

- Quintilian

To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man.

- Quintilian

When we cannot hope to win, it is an advantage to yield.

- Quintilian

God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.

- Quintilian

Fear of the future is worse than one's present fortune.

- Quintilian

For the mind is all the easier to teach before it is set.

- Quintilian

It seldom happens that a premature shoot of genius ever arrives at maturity.

- Quintilian

Though ambition in itself is a vice, yet it is often the parent of virtues.

- Quintilian

Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.

- Quintilian

To my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination.

- Quintilian

It is much easier to try one's hand at many things than to concentrate one's powers on one thing.

- Quintilian

He who speaks evil only differs from his who does evil in that he lacks opportunity.

- Quintilian

Everything that has a beginning comes to an end.

- Quintilian

A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.

- Quintilian

For it would have been better that man should have been born dumb, nay, void of all reason, rather than that he should employ the gifts of Providence to the destruction of his neighbor.

- Quintilian

Though ambition itself be a vice, yet it is often times the cause of virtues.

- Quintilian

The gifts of nature are infinite in their variety, and mind differs from mind almost as much as body from body.

- Quintilian

It is fitting that a liar should be a man of good memory.

- Quintilian

Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.

- Quintilian