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

Quintilian

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

Criticism Development Imagination Mindset Promise
A mediocre speech supported by all the power of delivery will be more impressive than the best speech unaccompanied by such power.
QUINTILIAN

Accompany Average Impression Support
Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.
QUINTILIAN

Poet Quick Writing Yourself
It is worth while too to warn the teacher that undue severity in correcting faults is liable at times to discourage a boy’s mind from effort.
QUINTILIAN

Courage Effort Mistake Severe Teacher Worth
One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.
QUINTILIAN

Goal Perspective Possible
Men of quality are in the wrong to undervalue, as they often do, the practise of a fair and quick hand in writing; for it is no immaterial accomplishment.
QUINTILIAN

Accomplishment Man Quality Value Wrong
Ambition is a vice, but it may be the father of virtue.
QUINTILIAN

Ambition Father Vice Virtue
When we cannot hope to win, it is an advantage to yield.
QUINTILIAN

Advantage Hope Protection Win
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

Better Born Destruction Dumb Man Neighbor Reason
The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.
QUINTILIAN

Capacity Writing
While we ponder when to begin, it becomes too late to do.
QUINTILIAN

Action Beginning Late
Forbidden pleasures alone are loved immoderately; when lawful, they do not excite desire.
QUINTILIAN

Alone Desire Excite Feeling Law
Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.
QUINTILIAN

Awake Dreams Hope
We must form our minds by reading deep rather than wide.
QUINTILIAN

Form Mindset Reading Wide
Let us never adopt the maxim, Rather lose our friend than our jest.
QUINTILIAN

Adopt Friendship Ourselves
It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.
QUINTILIAN

Children Himself Imitation Nurse

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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