A well begun is half ended.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Action

He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Age and Aging

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Age and Aging

Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Ancestry

He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Anger

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Astronomy

There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who when danger is pressing in will not acknowledge the divine power.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Atheism

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Beauty

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Character

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Cities and City Life

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Conflict

The first and the best victory is to conquer self.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Control

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Crime and Criminals

Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Death and Dying

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Death and Dying

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Deception

Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Democracy

These, then, will be some of the features of democracy... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, parti-colored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Democracy

Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Dictators and Dictatorship

Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Doctors

The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Education

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Education

Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Education

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Evil

Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Excess

We are twice armed if we fight with faith.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Faith

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Forgiveness

In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is the limit of our inquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the source of all that is bright and beautiful --in the visible world giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and reason --and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Goodness

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Government

Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves or their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Greatness

Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Health

We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Heaven

Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Honesty

Man is a two-legged animal without feathers.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Humankind

Man is a being in search of meaning.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Humankind

Even the gods love jokes.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Humor

I have good hope that there is something after death.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Immortality

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Knowledge

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Learning

All learning has an emotional base.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Learning

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.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Lies and Lying

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Love

Love is a serious mental disease.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Love

Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Love

They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Medicine

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Men

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Music

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Music

States are as the men, they grow out of human characters.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Nations

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Opinions

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Parents and Parenting

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Philosophers and Philosophy

The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Planning

Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Pleasure

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Poetry and Poets

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Politicians and Politics

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.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Politicians and Politics

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Professions and Professionals

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Psychology

Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information -- never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good -- he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Reason

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Revolutions and Revolutionaries

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Rhetoric

For just as poets love their own works, and fathers their own children, in the same way those who have created a fortune value their money, not merely for its uses, like other persons, but because it is their own production. This makes them moreover disagreeable companions, because they will praise nothing but riches.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Riches

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about School

If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Science and Scientists

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Science and Scientists

Science is nothing but perception.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Science and Scientists

In particular I may mention Sophocles the poet, who was once asked in my presence, How do you feel about love, Sophocles? are you still capable of it? to which he replied, Hush! if you please: to my great delight I have escaped from it, and feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master. I thought then, as I do now, that he spoke wisely. For unquestionably old age brings us profound repose and freedom from this and other passions.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Sex

Let nobody speak mischief of anybody.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Slander

We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Story and Story-Telling

The democratic youth lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Students

Too much attention to health is a hindrance to learning, to invention, and to studies of any kind, for we are always feeling suspicious shootings and swimmings in our heads, and we are prone to blame studies from them.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Studying

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Teachers and Teaching

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Teachers and Teaching

Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Thoughts and Thinking

Truth is its own reward.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Truth

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Truth

The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Tyranny

Self conquest is the greatest of victories.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Victory

The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Virtue

Wealth is well known to be a great comforter.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Wealth

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Wisdom

The wisest have the most authority.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Wisdom

Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Wisdom

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
Send to friend | View quote | Quotes about Worry