The one who learns and learns and doesn't practice is like the one who plows and plows and never plants.

People too smart to get involved in politics are doomed to live in societies run by people who aren't.

I would fain grow old learning many things.

A delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!

Wherefore also these Kinds [elements] occupied different places even before the universe was organised and generated out of them. Before that time, in truth, all these were in a state devoid of reason or measure, but when the work of setting in order this Universe was being undertaken, fire and water and earth and air, although possessing some traces of their known nature, were yet disposed as everything is likely to be in the absence of God; and inasmuch as this was then their natural condition, God began by first marking them out into shapes by means of forms and numbers.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

And what shall he suffer who slays him who of all men, as they say, is his own best friend? I mean the suicide, who deprives himself by violence of his appointed share of life. Not because the law of the state requires him. Nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune which has come upon him. Nor because he has had to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty.