Boethius Quotes

It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,'? says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.

He who is virtuous is wise; and he who is wise is good; and he who is good is happy.

Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.

Balance out the good things and the bad that have happened in your life and you will have to acknowledge that you are still way ahead. You are unhappy because you have lost those things in which you took pleasure? But you can also take comfort in the likelihood that what is now making you miserable will also pass away.

All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just.

If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?

One's virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune.

Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it - even if we so desired.

A man content to go to heaven alone will never go to heaven.

Wretched men cringe before tyrants who have no power, the victims of their trivial hopes and fears. They do not realise that anger is hopeless, fear is pointless and desire all a delusion. He whose heart is fickle is not his own master, has thrown away his shield, deserted his post, and he forges the links of the chain that holds him.

Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.

He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate, and set proud death beneath his feet, can look fortune in the face, unbending both to good and bad; his countenance unconquered.

In every kind of adversity, the bitterest part of a man's affliction is to remember that he once was happy.

In other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is a vice.

Contemplate the extent and stability of the heavens, and then at last cease to admire worthless things.

Give me Thy light, and fix my eyes on Thee!

As far as possible, join faith to reason.

So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. [...] human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.

Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law.

Man is so constituted that he then only excels other things when he knows himself.

So nothing is ever good or bad unless you think it so, and vice versa. All luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.

Inconsistency is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top

No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.

Love binds people too, in matrimony's sacred bonds where chaste lovers are met, and friends cement their trust and friendship. How happy is mankind, if the love that orders the stars above rules, too, in your hearts.

He who has calmly reconciled his life to fate ... can look fortune in the face.