Great Throughts Treasury

"Neither should we ever attempt to cure the body without curing the soul."

"No one learns without experience."

"Of all the things which a man has, next to the gods his soul is the most divine and most truly his own."

"Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then... we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many."

"Not only custom but nature also affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality."

"Nothing is more unworthy of a wise man, or ought to trouble him more, than to have allowed more time for trifling, and useless things, than they deserve."

"Our new-gotten riches are all a dream."

"Power to preserve under all circumstances the right, lawful opinion of what is and is not to be feared."

"Serious things cannot be understood without laughable things, nor opposites at all without principles."

"The cause of all the blunders committed by man arises from this excessive self-love. For the lover is blinded by the object loved; so that he passes a wrong judgment on what is just, good and beautiful, thinking that he ought always to honor what belongs to himself in preference to truth. For he who intends to be a great man ought to love, neither himself nor his own thins, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself, or by another."

"Science is nothing but perception."

"Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history."

"The essence of the beautiful and the good... lies in right proportions."

"The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows to manhood, he will have to be perfected."

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

"The law, like a good archer, should aim at the right measure of punishment, and in all cases at the deserved punishment."

"The most virtuous of all men is he that contents himself with being virtuous without seeking to appear so."

"The principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live - that principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honor, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honor and dishonor, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work."

"The soul is partly in eternity and partly in time."

"The punishment suffered by the wise who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of bad people."

"There is nothing so delightful as the hearing, or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of the man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive."

"There is a dishonor in being overcome by the love of money, or of wealth, or of political power, whether a man is frightened into surrender by the loss of them, or, having experienced the benefits of money and political corruption, is unable to rise above the seductions of them. For none of these are of a permanent or lasting nature; not to mention that no generous friendship ever sprang from them."

"Those who tell the stories rule society. "

"Truth is the source of every good to gods and men. He who expects to be blessed and fortunate in this world should be a partaker of it from the earliest moment of his life."

"Truth is the beginning of every good thing, both in heaven and on earth; and he who would be blessed and happy should be fro the first a partaker of the truth, that he may live a true man as long as possible, for then he an be trusted; but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary falsehood and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool."

"Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary."

"Wisdom alone is a science of other sciences and of itself."

"Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

"[In the cave allegory] those whose who are destitute of philosophy may be compared to prisoners in a cave, who are only able to look in one direction because they are bound, and who have a fire behind them and a wall in front. Between them and the wall there is nothing; all that they see are shadows of themselves, and of objects behind them, cast on the wall by the light of the fire. Inevitably they regard these shadows as real, and have no notion of the objects to which they are due. At last some man succeeds in escaping from the cave to the light of the sun; for the first time he sees real things, and becomes aware that he had hitherto been deceived by shadows. If he is the sort of philosopher who is fit to become a guardian, he will feel it his duty to those who were formerly his fellow prisoners to go down again into the cave, instruct them as to the truth, and show them the way up. But he will have difficulty in persuading them, because, coming out of the sunlight, he will see shadows less clearly than they do, and will seem to them stupider than before his escape."

"A man should be of good cheer about his soul… if he has earnestly pursued the pleasure of learning, and adorned his soul with the adornment of temperance, and justice, and courage, and freedom, and truth."

"We should not move the body without the soul or the soul without the body, and thus they will be on their guard against each other, and be healthy and well-balanced."

"Where old men have no shame, there young men will most certainly be devoid of reverence. The best way of training the young is to train yourself at the same time; not to admonish them, but to be always carrying out your own admonitions in practice."

"When man is not properly trained, he is the most savage animal on the face of the globe."

"All men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice."

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

"Beauty is the splendor of the true."

"Education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes… But our present argument indicates that the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body."

"God is a Being of perfect simplicity and truth, both in deed and word, and neither changes in himself nor imposes upon others."

"Knowledge is the Food of the Soul."

"Every man’s soul has by the law of his birth been a spectator of eternal truth, or it would never have passed into this our mortal frame."

"God did not make the soul after the body… He made the soul in origin and excellence prior to and older than the body, to be the ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be the subject."

"It will never be possible to get rid of evil altogether, for there must always be something opposite to good."

"Of all the things of a man’s soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil."

"The belief in immortality depends finally upon the belief in God. If there exists a good and wise God, then there also exists a progress of mankind toward perfection; and if there be no progress of men towards perfection, then there cannot be a good and wise God. We cannot suppose that God’s moral government, the beginnings of which we see in the world and in ourselves, will cease when we leave this life."

"Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand."

"Of all things which a man has, next to the gods, his soul is the most divine and most truly his own."

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

"The end to aim at is assimilation to God."

"The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good."

"The origin of all wars is the pursuit of wealth, and we are forced to pursue wealth because we live in slavery to the cares of the body."