You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?

It behooves those who take the young to task to leave them room for excuse, lest they drive them to be hardened by too much rebuke.

Life should be lived as play.

Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds.

Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information - never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good - he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.

. . . the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth.

When two friends are in the mood to chat, we have to go about it in a gentler and more dialectical way. By 'more dialectical,' I mean not only that we give real responses, but that we base our responses solely on what the interlocutor admits that he himself knows.