The love, more especially, which is concerned with the good, and which is perfected in company with temperance and justice, whether among gods or men, has the greatest power, and is the source of all our happiness and harmony, and makes us friends with the gods who are above us, and with one another.

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.

All loves should be simply stepping stones to the love of God. So it was with me; and blessed be his name for his great goodness and mercy.

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.

Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?

A certain portion of mankind do not believe at all in the existence of the gods.

For the poets tell us, don't they, that the melodies they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as bees do honey, flying like the bees? And what they say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him. So long as he has this in his possession, no man is able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy.