He once asked for a statue; and being questioned as to his reason for doing so, he said, “I am practising disappointment.”
Once he was begging of some one (for he did this at first out of actual want), he said, “If you have given to any one else, give also to me; and if you have never given to any one, then begin with me.”
On one occasion, he was asked by the tyrant, “What sort of brass was the best for a statue?” and he replied, “That of which the statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton are made.”
When he was asked how Dionysius treats his friends, he said, “Like bags; those which are full he hangs up, and those which are empty he throws away.”
A man who was lately married put an inscription on his house, “Hercules Callinicus, the son of Jupiter, lives here; let no evil enter.” And so Diogenes wrote in addition, “An alliance is made after the war is over.”
He used to say that covetousness was the metropolis of all evils.
Seeing on one occasion a profligate man in an inn eating olives, he said, “If you had dined thus, you would not have supped thus.”
One of his apophthegms was, that good men were the images of the Gods; another, that love was the business of those who had nothing to do.
When he was asked what was miserable in life, he answered, “An indigent old man.”
And when the question was put to him, what beast inflicts the worst bite, he said, “Of wild beasts the sycophant, and of tame animals the flatterer.”