Apollonius Of Tyana Quotes
Apollonius of Tyana was a first-century Greek philosopher and wandering teacher whose life blended Pythagorean discipline with a deep interest in ethics and self-mastery. His surviving words focus on virtue, moderation, and the dangers of greed, delivered with the directness of someone who lived what he preached.
These quotes work well in philosophy discussions, ethics presentations, personal journals, and reflective social media posts. Browse the collection below.
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“A man must fortify himself and understand that a wise man who yields to laziness or anger or passion or love of drink, or who commits any other action prompted by impulse and inopportune, will probably find his fault condoned; but if he stoops to greed, he will not be pardoned, but render himself odious as a combination of all vices at once.”
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“I pray as follows: May justice reign, may the laws not be broken, may the wise men be poor, and the poor men rich, without sin.”
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“It is at the time of dawn that we must commune with the gods.”
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“I delight to lodge in such temples as are not regularly kept closed. None of the gods reject me; they make me partner of their roof.”
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“O thou Sun, send me as far over the earth as is my pleasure and thine, and may I make the acquaintance of good men, but never hear anything of bad ones, nor they of me.”
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“You need not wonder at my knowing all human languages; for, to tell you the truth, I also understand all the secrets of human silence.”
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“Festivals cause diseases, since they lighten cares but increase gluttony.”
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“Just as an individual of pre-eminent worth transforms democracy into a monarchy of the best man, even so the rule of one man, if in all things it has an eye to the common welfare, is democracy.”
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“The gods, as they are beneficent, if they find anyone who is healthy and whole and unscarred by vice, will send him away, surely, after crowning him, not with golden crowns, but with all sorts of blessings.”
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“I asked questions when I was a stripling, and it is not my business to ask questions now, but to teach people what I have discovered.”
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“It is the duty of the law-giver to deliver to the many the instructions of whose truth he has persuaded himself.”
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“All the earth is mine, and I have a right to go all over it and through it.”
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“Don't keep your good manners to the end another time, but begin with them.”
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“If you have problems of conduct that are difficult and hard to settle, I will furnish you with solutions, for I not only know matters of practice and duty, but I even know them beforehand.”
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“O ye gods, grant unto me to have little and to want nothing.”
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“I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future.”
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“Virtue comes by nature, learning, and practice, and thanks to virtue, all of the aforesaid may deserve approval.”
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“I asked certain rich men if they felt embittered. 'How could we not?' they said. So I asked them what caused this anguish. They blamed their wealth.”
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“Every argument is incapable of helping unless it is singular and addressed to a single person. Therefore, one who discourses in any other way presumably does so from love of reputation.”
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“Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.”