Boethius Quotations

I who once wrote songs with keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures. Wounded Muses tell me what I must write, and elegiac verses bathe my face with real tears. Not even terror could drive from me these faithful companions of my long journey. Poetry, which was once the glory of my happy and flourishing youth, is still my comfort in this misery of my old age.

The completely simultaneous and perfect possession of unlimited life at a single moment.

Love has three kinds of origin, namely: suffering, friendship and love. A human love has a corporal and intellectual origin.

For in all adversity of fortune the worst sort of misery is to have been happy.

Every man must be content with that glory which he may have at home.

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.

...Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like drunk men, know not the road home.

Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.

Nunc fluens facit tempus,nunc stans facit aeternitatum.(The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity.)

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.