The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
Knowledge unqualified is knowledge simply of something learned.
No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may requir...
The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture. At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one's education and culture can either provide the greatest assi...
There are three classes of men-lovers of wisdom lovers of honour lovers of gain.
I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.
Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.
I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.
What if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine,...the man becoming in that communion, the friend of Go...
Each citizen should play his part in the community according to his individual gifts.
[On the virtuous man] "He combines the highest, lowest and middle chords in complete harmony within himself.
Then the lover, who is true and no counterfeit, must of necessity be loved by his love.
Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.
He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.
The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is con...