done some discreditable service, he told him, “The sword is a good sword, but the handle is infamous.” And when some people were praising a man who had given him something, he said to them, “And do not you praise me who was worthy to receive it?” He was asked by some one to give him back his cloak; but he replied, “If you gave it me, it is mine; and if you only lent it me, I am using it.” A supposititious son (ὑποβολιμαῖος) of somebody once said to him, that he had gold in his cloak; “No doubt,” said he, “that is the very reason why I sleep with it under my head (ὑποβεβλημένος).” When he was asked what advantage he had derived from philosophy, he replied, “If no other, at least this, that I am prepared for every kind of fortune.” The question was put to him what countryman he was, and he replied, “A Citizen of the world.” Some men were sacrificing to the Gods to prevail on them to send them sons, and he said, “And do you not sacrifice to procure sons of a particular character?” Once he was asking the president of a society for a contribution,14 and said to him:—
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.