"Similarly with regard to truth, won't we say that a soul is maimed if it hates a voluntary falsehood, cannot endure to have one in itself, and is greatly angered when it exists in others, but is nonetheless content to accept an involuntary falsehood, isn't angry when it is caught being ignorant, and bears its lack of learning easily, wallowing in it like a pig?"

"The wise man will want to be ever with him who is better than himself."

"No knowledge considers or prescribes for the advantage of the stronger, but for that of the weaker, which it rules."

"Philosophers are the ones who can reach what always stays the same in every respect, and non- philosophers the ones who cannot, who wonder among the many things that go in every direction."

"I must distinguish between that which always is and never becomes and which is apprehended by reason and reflection, and that which always becomes and never is and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense."

"The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings."

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

"Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety."

"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."

"The only real ill-doing is the deprivation of knowledge."

"Laws are partly formed for the sake of good men, in order to instruct them how they may live on friendly terms with one another, and partly for the sake of those who refuse to be instructed, whose spirit cannot be subdued, or softened, or hindered from plunging into evil."

"Is not the love of learning identical with a philosophical disposition?"

"If one has made a mistake, and fails to correct it, one has made a greater mistake."

"If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things."

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

"You don’t seem to love money too much. And those who haven’t made their own money are usually like you. But those who have made it for themselves are twice as fond of it as those who haven’t."

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

"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."

"No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated."

"Men say that everyone is naturally a lover of himself, and that it is right that it should be so. This is a mistake; for in fact 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 upon 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 things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by himself or by another."