Regard as your most faithful friends, not those who praise everything you say or do, but those who criticize your mistakes.

Never hope to conceal any shameful thing which you have done; for even if you do conceal it from others, your own heart will know. … Pursue the enjoyments which are of good repute; for pleasure attended by honor is the best thing in the world, but pleasure without honor is the worst.

It is not fitting that the evil produced by men should be imputed to things; let those bear the blame who make an ill use of things in themselves good.

Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is immortal.

Regard as your most faithful friends, not those who praise everything you say or do, but those who criticize your mistakes.

Those who directed the state in the time of Solon and Cleisthenes did not establish a polity which ... trained the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and licence to do what they pleased as happiness, but rather a polity which detested and punished such men and by so doing made all the citizens better and wiser.

We should not call a city happy because it attracts masses of citizens from everywhere; a fortunate city is one in which the race of the original inhabitants is best preserved.