Quotes from The Twelve Caesars

Suetonius ·  363 pages

Rating: (13.6K votes)


“Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars


“So much for the Emperor; the rest of this history must deal with the Monster.
—IV:22”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars


“Some people are slow to do what they promise; you are slow to promise what you have already done.”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars


“Upon the whole, he added nothing to his own happiness by all the dangers, the fatigues, and the perpetual anxiety which he had incurred in the pursuit of unlimited power.”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars


“Finding himself now attacked on all hands with naked poniards, he wrapped the toga 96 about his head, and at the same moment drew the skirt round his legs with his left hand, that he might fall more decently with the lower part of his body covered. He was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering a groan only, but no cry, at the first wound; although some authors relate, that when Marcus Brutus fell upon him, he exclaimed, "What! art thou, too, one of them? Thou, my son!" 97 The whole assembly instantly (52) dispersing, he lay for some time after he expired, until three of his slaves laid the body on a litter, and carried it home, with one arm hanging down over the side.”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars



“The titles of his books are recorded as follows: The Twelve Caesars; Royal Biographies; Lives of Famous Whores; Roman Manners and Customs; The Roman Year; Roman Festivals; Roman Dress; Greek Games; Offices of State; Cicero’s Republic; The Physical Defects of Mankind; Methods of Reckoning Time; An Essay on Nature; Greek Objurgations; Grammatical Problems; Critical Signs Used in Books.”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars


“When the governor ordered him to travel around the district courts to administer justice and he arrived at Gades, he noticed the statue of Alexander the Great at the temple of Hercules and groaned as though disgusted with his own idleness—he had done nothing worth remembering at an age when Alexander had already conquered the world. He”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars


“The termination of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey forms a new epoch in the Roman History, at which a Republic, which had subsisted with unrivalled glory during a period of about four hundred and sixty years, relapsed into a state of despotism, whence it never more could emerge. So sudden a transition from prosperity to the ruin of public freedom, without the intervention of any foreign enemy, excites a reasonable conjecture, that the constitution in which it could take place, however vigorous in appearance, must have lost that soundness of political health which had enabled it to endure through so many ages.”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars


“Let us go whither the omens of the Gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is now cast." XXXIII.”
― Suetonius, quote from The Twelve Caesars


About the author

Suetonius
Born place: in Hippo Regia, Algeria
Born date January 3, 0069
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Popular quotes

“هذا ما يفكر فيه الجميع: أنا لا انتمي إلى هنا. هذا ما يقوله كل فردٍ منهم بينه وبين نفسه.
هم محقون، وماذا بعد ؟ ص 141”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories


“Romance goes like this:
Boy gets girl.
Boy loses girl.
Boy gets girl again.
The end.
It can't be any other way.”
― Nora Raleigh Baskin, quote from Anything But Typical


“You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”
― Richard Feynman, quote from Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher


“Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that go racing by. The bone in her teeth! The spume, the flying spume of Time, cast up on these beaches where old sailors can no longer keep their bones from the restless, the unwearied universe. Where has she gone? My lady, the mate of my soul? Gone across the running tides of Aquarius, of Pisces, of Aries. Gone. Gone in her little boat, her nipples pressed against the black velvet lid, gone, sailing away forever from the star-washed shores, the dry shoals of the habitable worlds. She is her own ship, she is the figurehead of her own ship, and the captain. Bosun, Bosun, put out the launch! Sailmaker, make a sail! She has left us behind. We have left her behind. She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, Captain for the universe is leaving us behind…”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Citadel of the Autarch


“I can’t help feeling as if there’s something missing in my life. But I don’t know what it is. And the harder I look, the more I can’t find it because there’s just too much pressure and not enough time.”
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