One thing, however, I must premise, that without the assistance of natural capacity, rules and precepts are of no efficacy.
QUINTILIANTo my mind the boy who gives least promise is one in whom the critical faculty develops in advance of the imagination.
More Quintilian Quotes
-
-
When defeat is inevitable, it is wisest to yield.
QUINTILIAN -
Virtue, though she gets her beginning from nature, yet receives her finishing touches from learning.
QUINTILIAN -
A liar must have a good memory.
QUINTILIAN -
If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.
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 -
Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.
QUINTILIAN -
Where evil habits are once settled, they are more easily broken than mended.
QUINTILIAN -
It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.
QUINTILIAN -
While we ponder when to begin, it becomes too late to do.
QUINTILIAN -
An evil-speaker differs from an evil-doer only in the want of opportunity.
QUINTILIAN -
The perfection of art is to conceal art.
QUINTILIAN -
Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.
QUINTILIAN -
Though ambition may be a fault in itself, it is often the mother of virtues.
QUINTILIAN -
The soul languishing in obscurity contracts a kind of rust, or abandons itself to the chimera of presumption; for it is natural for it to acquire something, even when separated from any one.
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