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:—
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?”