The choice of souls was in most cases based on their own experience of a previous life... Knowledge easily acquired is that which the enduing self had in an earlier life, so that it flows back easily.

I fear this is not the right exchange to attain virtue, to exchange pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains and fears for fears, the greater for the less like coins, but that the only valid currency for which all these things should be exchanged is wisdom.

No one ever dies an atheist.

It is better to be wise, and not to seem so, than to seem wise, and not be so; yet men, for the most part, desire the contrary.

A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.

Mariner, do not ask whose tomb this may be, but go with good fortune: I wish you a kinder sea.

You can remember, a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones.