“Spoil all the rest, but keep your hands from Hector.”
He used to say that courtesans were the queens of kings; for that they asked them for whatever they chose. When the Athenians had voted that Alexander was Bacchus, he said to them, “Vote, too, that I am Serapis.” When a man reproached him for going into unclean places, he said, “The sun too penetrates into privies, but is not polluted by them.” When supping in a temple, as some dirty loaves were set before him, he took them up and threw them away, saying that nothing dirty ought to come into a temple; and when some one said to him, “You philosophize without being possessed of any knowledge,” he said, “If I only pretend to wisdom, that is philosophizing.” A man once brought him a boy, and said that he was a very clever child, and one of an admirable disposition. “What, then,” said Diogenes, “does he want of me?” He used to say, that those who utter virtuous sentiments but do not do them, are no better than harps, for that a harp has no hearing or feeling. Once he was going into a theatre while every one else was coming out of it; and when asked why he did so, “It is,” said he, “what I have been doing all my life.” Once when he saw a young man putting on effeminate airs, he said to him, “Are you not ashamed to have worse plans for yourself than nature had for you? for she has made you a man, but you are trying to force yourself to be a woman.” When he saw an ignorant man tuning a psaltery, he said to him, “Are you not ashamed to be arranging proper sounds on a wooden instrument, and not arranging your soul to a proper life?” When a man said to him, “I am not calculated for philosophy,” he said, “Why then do you live, if you have no desire to live properly?” To a man who treated his father with contempt, he said, “Are you not ashamed to despise him to whom you owe it that you have it in your power to give yourself airs at all?” Seeing a handsome young man chattering in an unseemly manner, he said, “Are you not ashamed to draw a sword cut of lead out of a scabbard of ivory?” Being once reproached for drinking in a vintner’s shop, he said, “I have my hair cut, too, in a barber’s.” At another time, he was attacked for having accepted a cloak from Antipater, but he replied:—