Virtue is a kind of health, beauty and good habit of the soul.

We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

The well-nurtured youth is one who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he became a man of gentle heart.

Love: a grave mental disease.

Because, unlike courage and wisdom, which made our state brave and wise by being present in a particular part of it, discipline operates by being diffused throughout the whole of it. It produces a concord between its strongest and weakest and middle elements, whether you define them by the standard of good sense, or of strength, or of numbers or money or the like. And so we are quite justified in regarding discipline as this sort of natural harmony and agreement between higher and lower about which of them is to rule in state and individual.

I do not live to play, but I play in order that I may live, and return with greater zest to the labors of life.