The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate it for the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole.

But at three, four, five, and even six years the childish nature will require sports; now is the time to get rid of self-will in him, punishing him, but not so as to disgrace him.

And tell him it's quite true that the best of the philosophers are of no use to their fellows; but that he should blame, not the philosophers, but those who fail to make use of them.

Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.

Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.

There is a ... matter - much more valuable and divine than natural philosophy . ... On this matter I must speak to you in enigmas.