184 definitions
The book's index
On Old Age (Cato Maior de Senectute)
116 concepts · 184 definitions
- achievement1
- ages of man1
- appetite1
- athlete1
- auspices1
- authority1
- avarice1
- banquet1
- bereavement1
- body2
- Carthage1
- character1
- constancy1
- contempt for death1
- conversation1
- courage1
- cultivated land1
- culture1
- dead1
- death5
- decay1
- delay1
- diligence1
- dinner party1
- dying1
- earth1
- eloquence2
- epitaph1
- exercise2
- fame1
- farmer1
- farming1
- feebleness1
- folly2
- fool1
- fretfulness1
- gardening1
- glory1
- gold1
- grafting1
- grape1
- gravity1
- grief2
- growth1
- happiness2
- hedonism1
- honour1
- hope1
- hypocrisy1
- imagination1
- immortality1
- influence2
- intellect2
- intellectual pleasure1
- intemperance1
- lack1
- learning2
- leisure1
- life7
- longevity3
- lust1
Old age (n.) is wretched when it has to defend itself by speech.
Old age (n.) is the steersman sitting quietly in the stern with the tiller while the crew climb the masts: it does not do what young men do, but what is much more important.
Old age (n.) is what all wish to attain, and at which all grumble when attained.
Old age (n.) is respectable just as long as it asserts itself, maintains its proper rights, and is not enslaved to any one.
Soul (n.) that has served its time in the campaigns of desire and ambition, rivalry and hatred, may at last live in its own thoughts and dwell apart.
Soul (n.) is of heavenly origin, forced down from its home in the highest and buried in earth, a place quite opposed to its divine nature.
Soul (n.) was never seen even in life; we knew it was in the body only from what it did.
Soul (n.) is always in motion and self-moved, so its motion will have no end, for it is not likely ever to abandon itself.
Life (n.) draws to its end by slow and imperceptible degrees: there is no sudden breakage; it just slowly goes out.
Life (n.) does not always turn sour from keeping, any more than every wine does.
Life (n.) is an inn, not a home: nature has given us a place of entertainment, not of residence.
Life (n.) is a course that nature lets us run but in one way, and only once.
Death (n.) puts out the young like a great fire drowned with a deluge of water; the old go out like a fire that has burnt down of its own nature.
Death (n.) is either to be totally disregarded, if it entirely extinguishes the soul, or even to be desired, if it brings us where we are to exist forever.
Death (n.) hangs over our head every hour; how can a man ever be unshaken in soul if he fears it?
Death (n.) is common to every time of life.
Pleasure (n.) that is more than ordinarily violent and lasting darkens all the light of the soul.
Pleasure (n.) is \"vice's bait\": men are caught by it as fish by a hook.
Pleasure (n.) is watched by youth from the front row and by old age from the back — but the man in the last row does get pleasure.
Pleasure (n.) is a fruitful source of treasons, revolutions and secret communications with the enemy.
Memory (n.) is the harvest of old age: the rich store of blessings laid up in earlier life.
Memory (n.) in the old keeps whatever interests them: no old man was ever heard of who forgot where he had hidden his money.
Memory (n.) dwindles only if you do not keep it in practice, or happen to be somewhat dull by nature.
Memory (n.) is kept in working order, after the manner of the Pythagoreans, by repeating each evening whatever one has said, heard or done that day.
Senility (n.) is a fault not of old age as such but of a sluggish, spiritless and sleepy old age.
Senility (n.) was the charge Sophocles' sons brought against him in court; he read the judges the Oedipus Coloneus he had just written, and was acquitted.
Senility (n.) belongs to old men of unsound character, not to all — as wantonness belongs not to all young men but to the bad set among them.
Longevity (n.) is never long, for nothing is long in which there is any \"last\": when it arrives all the past has slipped away, and only what virtue achieved remains.
Longevity (n.) sees much to shun and much for tears — and perhaps much that gives pleasure too; and tears come in youth as well.
Longevity (n.) needs no apology: asked at a hundred and seven why he consented to stay alive so long, Gorgias said, \"I have no fault to find with old age.\"
Study (n.) is the training ground of the mind; while one sweats and labours at it, the loss of bodily strength is hardly felt.
Study (n.) in old age is the light surprising you still at a problem begun in the night, and night finding you busy on what you began at dawn.
Study (n.) ended only with life for the great poets and founders of philosophy.
Influence (n.) is the crowning grace of old age.
Influence (n.) in old age, especially an old age that has enjoyed honours, is worth all the pleasures of youth put together.