Boethius Quotes

We cannot raise the question: How can there be evil if God exists? without raising the second: How can there be good if He exists not?

– Boethius

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.

– Boethius

If God imposes order upon all things, then there is no opportunity for random events.

– Boethius

As far as possible, join faith to reason.

– Boethius

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.

– Boethius

The science of numbers ought to be preferred as an acquisition before all others, because of its necessity and because of the great secrets and other mysteries which there are in the properties of numbers. All sciences partake of it, and it has need of none.

– Boethius

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

– Boethius

Poetry, which was once the glory of my happy and flourishing youth, is still my comfort in this misery of my old age.

– Boethius

I who once wrote songs with keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures.

– Boethius

Whose happiness is so firmly established that he has no quarrel from any side with his estate of life?

– Boethius

Good men seek it by the natural means of the virtues; evil men, however, try to achieve the same goal by a variety of concupiscences, and that is surely an unnatural way of seeking the good. Don’t you agree?

– Boethius

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.

– Boethius

And it is because you don’t know the end and purpose of things that you think the wicked and the criminal have power and happiness.

– Boethius

If I have fully diagnosed the cause and nature of your condition, you are wasting away in pining and longing for your former good fortune. It is the loss of this which, as your imagination works upon you, has so corrupted your mind. I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion.

– Boethius

Thou knowest that what I say is the truth, and that I have never boasted of my good deeds in a spirit of self-praise. For whenever a man by proclaiming his good deeds receives the recompense of fame, he diminishes in a measure the secret reward of a good conscience.

– Boethius

The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity.

– Boethius

So dry your tears. Fortune has not yet turned her hatred against all your blessings. The storm has not yet broken upon you with too much violence. Your anchors are holding firm and they permit you both comfort in the present, and hope in the future.

– Boethius

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.

– Boethius

No man is rich who shakes and groans
Convinced that he needs more.

– Boethius

It is not that a man of virtue is honored because of high office, but rather that the office is honored because of his virtue.

– Boethius

He is in no real danger. He merely suffers from a lethargy, a sickness that is common among the depressed. He has forgotten who he really is, but he will recover, for he used to know me, and all I have to do is cloud the mist that beclouds his vision.

– Boethius

With chaste affections man and wife
In solemn wedlock it entwines.
Love’s laws most trusty comrades bind.
How happy is the human race,
If Love, by which the heavens are ruled,
To rule men’s minds is set in place!

– Boethius

Human perversity, then, makes divisions of that which by nature is one and simple, and in attempting to obtain part of something which has no parts, succeeds in getting neither the part – which is nothing- nor the whole, which they are not interested in.

– Boethius

Men who give up the common goal of all things that exist, thereby cease to exist themselves. Some may perhaps think it strange that we say that wicked men, who form the majority of men, do not exist; but that is how it is. I am not trying to deny the wickedness of the wicked; what I do deny is that their existence is absolute and complete existence. Just as you might call a corpse a dead man, but couldn’t simply call it a man, so I would agree that the wicked are wicked, but could not agree that they have unqualified existence.

– Boethius

Mad Fortune sweeps along in wanton pride,
Uncertain as Euripus’ surging tide;
Now tramples mighty kings beneath her feet;
Now sets the conquered in the victor’s seat.
She heedeth not the wail of hapless woe,
But mocks the griefs that from her mischief flow.
Such is her sport; so proveth she her power;
And great the marvel, when in one brief hour
She shows her darling lifted high in bliss,
Then headlong plunged in misery’s abyss.

– Boethius

But by the same logic as men become just through the possession of justice, or wise through the possession of wisdom, so those who possess divinity necessary become divine. Each happy individual is therefore divine. While only God is so by nature, as many as you like may become so by participation.

– Boethius

There is no danger: he is suffering from drowsiness, that disease which attacks so many minds which have been deceived.

– Boethius

Oh teach the mind t’ aetherial heights to rise,
And view familiar, in its native skies,
Thy source of good; thy splendor to descry,
And on thy self, undazled, fix her eye.
Oh quicken this dull mass of mortal clay;
Shine through the soul, and drive its clouds away!
For thou art Light. In thee the righteous find
Calm rest, and soft serenity of mind;
Thee they regard alone; to thee they tend;
At once our great original and end,
At once our means, our end, our guide, our way,
Our utmost bound, and our eternal stay!

– Boethius