How strange it is that Socrates, after having made the children common, should hinder lovers from carnal intercourse only, but should permit love and familiarities between father and son or between brother and brother, than which nothing can be more unseemly, since even without them love of this sort is improper. How strange, too, to forbid intercourse for no other reason than the violence of the pleasure, as though the relationship of father and son or of brothers with one another made no difference.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

A true friend is one soul in two bodies.

And of course, the brain is not responsible for any of the sensations at all. The correct view is that the seat and source of sensation is the region of the heart.

A friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend's existence...makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.

The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.

The final cause, then, produces motion through being loved.