It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

Saying the words that come from knowledge is no sign of having it.

Some believe it to be just friends wanting, as if to be healthy enough to wish health.

A vivid image compels the whole body to follow.

Also our fellow competitors, who are indeed the people just mentioned - we do not compete with men who lived a hundred centuries ago, or those yet not born, or the dead, or those who dwell near the Pillars of Hercules, or those whom, in our opinion or that of others, we take to be far below us or far above us. So too we compete with those who follow the same ends as ourselves; we compete with our rivals in sport or in love, and generally with those who are after the same things; and it is therefore these whom we are bound to envy beyond all others. Hence the saying.

Anything whose presence or absence makes no discernible difference is no essential part of the whole.

We ought not to listen to those who exhort us, because we are human, to think of human things....We ought rather to take on immortality as much as possible, and do all that we can to live in accordance with the highest element within us; for even if its bulk is small, in its power and value it far exceeds everything.