“Refuse not thou to heed The gifts which from the mighty Gods proceed.”[74]
A man once struck him with a broom, and said, “Take care,” so he struck him in return with his staff, and said, “Take care.”
He once said to a man who was addressing anxious entreaties to a courtesan, “What can you wish to obtain, you wretched man, that you had not better be disappointed in?” Seeing a man reeking all over with unguents, he said to him, “Have a care, lest the fragrance of your head give a bad odour to your life.” One of his sayings was, that servants serve their masters, and that wicked men are the slaves of their appetites. Being asked why slaves were called ἀνδράποδα, he replied, “Because they have the feet of men (τοὺς πόδας ἀνδρῶν), and a soul such as you who are asking this question.” He once asked a profligate fellow for a mina; and when he put the question to him, why he asked others for an obol, and him for a mina, he said, “Because I hope to get something from the others another time, but the Gods alone know whether I shall ever extract anything from you again.” Once he was reproached for asking favours, while Plato never asked for any; and he said:—
“He asks as well as I do, but he does it Bending his head, that no one else may hear.”
One day he saw an unskilful archer shooting; so he went and sat down by the target, saying, “Now I shall be out of harm’s way.” He used to say, that those who were in love were disappointed in regard of the pleasure they expected. When he was asked whether death was an evil, he replied, “How can that be an evil which we do not feel when it is present?” When Alexander was once standing by him, and saying, “Do not you fear me?” He replied, “No; for what are you, a good or an evil?” And as he said that he was good, “Who, then,” said Diogenes, “fears the good?” He used to say, that education was, for the young sobriety, for the old comfort, for the poor riches, and for the rich an ornament. When Didymus the adulterer was once trying to cure the eye of a young girl (κόρης), he said, “Take care, lest when you are curing the eye of the maiden, you do not hurt the pupil.”[75] A man once said to him, that his friends laid plots against him; “What then,” said he, “are you to do, if you must look upon both your friends and enemies in the same light?”
