“Among wise men there is no place at all left for hatred. For no one except the greatest of fools would hate good men. And there is no reason at all for hating the bad. For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind. And if this is so, since we think of people who are sick in body as deserving sympathy rather than hatred, much more so do they deserve pity rather than blame who suffer an evil more severe than any physical illness.”

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

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

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

“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.”

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

“If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy”

“You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.”

“Boethius moved from considering history from the actor's point of view to a "timeless" eternal view. From the divine perspective, nothing is ever utterly lost, because all of life is possessed by God in the eternal now. Though time was gnawing away at Boethius and stealing all he valued, God was beyond time and loss. Gaining this philosophical vantage allowed the last Roman to become one of the first men of the Middle Ages.”

“In other living creatures ignorance of self is nature”

“Indeed, the condition of human nature is just this; man towers above the rest of creation so long as he realizes his own nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things to be ignorant of themselves, is natural; but for man it is a defect.”