Quotes to inspire and reflect

Nothing could be more important than that the work of a soldier is well done.

Yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.

Wisdom always makes men fortunate: for by wisdom no man could ever err, and therefore, he must act rightly and succeed, or his wisdom would be wisdom no longer.

Without any one teaching him he will recover his knowledge for himself, if he is only asked questions

Will life be worth having, if that higher part of man be destroyed, which is improved by justice and depraved by injustice?

Wisdom alone is the true and unalloyed coin for which we ought to exchange all things, for this and with this everything is bought and sold Fortitude, temperance, and justice; in a word, true virtue subsists with wisdom.

What shall we say about those spectators, then, who can see a plurality of beautiful things, but not beauty itself, and who are incapable of following if someone else tries to lead them to it, and who can see many moral actions, but not morality itself, and so on? That they only ever entertain beliefs, and do not know any of the things they believe?

Whenever anyone informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

When I hear a man discoursing of virtue, or of any sort of wisdom, who is a true man and worthy of his theme, I am delighted beyond measure: and I compare the man and his words, and note the harmony and correspondence of them. And such a one I deem to be the true musician, having in himself a fairer harmony than that of the lyre.

When the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge? Is not that the inference?

When anything is in the presence of evil, but is not as yet evil, the presence of good arouses the desire of good in that thing; but the presence of evil, which makes a thing evil, takes away the desire and friendship of the good; for that which was once both good and evil has now become evil only, and the good has no friendship with evil.

When you admonish a wrongdoer, do so gently, that it may not lead to hostility.

What kind of man am I? One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue; one who, however, wouldn’t be any less pleased to be refuted than to refute. For I count being refuted a greater good, insofar as it is a greater good for oneself to be delivered from the worst thing there is than to deliver someone else from it.

We shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know;— that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.

Wealth, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.

We are like people looking for something they have in their hands all the time; we're looking in all directions except at the thing we want, which is probably why we haven't found it.

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils — no, nor the human race, as I believe — and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.

True friendship can exist only between equals.

True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place; but they will not stay long. They run away from a man's mind, so they are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason. Once they are tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable.

To the rulers of the state then, if to any, it belongs of right to use falsehood, to deceive either enemies or their own citizens, for the good of the state: and no one else may meddle with this privilege.

Wars and revolutions and battles, you see, are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.

Those whose hearts are fixed on reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers.

Those who tell the stories rule society.

Those who have knowledge are more confident than those who have no knowledge, and they are more confident after they have learned than before.

Those who have a natural talent for calculation are generally quick-witted at every other kind of knowledge; and even the dull, if they have had an arithmetical training, although they may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than they would have been.

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.

This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.

This feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.

Think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal.

They think that you bear old age more easily not because of the way you live but because you’re wealthy, for the wealthy, they say, have many consolations.

There's no chance of their having a conscious glimpse of the truth as long as they refuse to disturb the things they take for granted and remain incapable of explaining them. For if your starting point is unknown, and your end-point and intermediate stages are woven together out of unknown material, there may be coherence, but knowledge is completely out of the question.

There's a victory and defeat. The first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

This alone is to be feared: the closed mind, the sleeping imagination, the death of spirit.

There is nothing I like better than conversing with aged men. For I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged and difficult. Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give it?

There is, in my view, the birth of society that each of us, far from being sufficient to itself, on the contrary need a large number of people

There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man, who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul with the outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters both.

There are three arts which are concerned with all things. One which uses, another which makes, and a third which imitates them.

Those who don't know must learn from those who do.

The wrong use of a thing is far worse than the non-use.

There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who when danger is pressing in will not acknowledge the divine power.

The useful is the noble and the hurtful is the base

The truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing.

The true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things.

The true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and, at last, knows what the essence of beauty is.

The worst type of man behaves as badly in his waking life as some men do in their dreams.

The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.