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Home  »  Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men  »  Cleobulus

S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.

Cleobulus

  • [One of the Seven Wise Men of Greece; king of Lindus, in Rhodes, in the sixth century B.C.]
  • Be swift to hear, slow to speak.

  • “Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.”—Epistle of St. James, i. 19.
  • Attributed to Bias in the form, “Hear much, speak little.”
  • Cleobulus also advised “moderation in all things.”
  • His daughter, Cleobuline, was a great inventor of riddles. To her is ascribed that on the year: “A father has twelve children, and each of these thirty daughters, on one side white and on the other black; and, though immortal, they all die.”