The ultimate design of the Mysteries ... was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, ... a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good.

Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.

An old man is twice a child, and so is a drunken man.

May not the wolf, as the proverb says, claim a hearing?

The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows to manhood, he will have to be perfected.

To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.

The deity on purpose [sings] the liveliest of all lyrics through the most miserable poet.