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.

Athenian men, I respect and love you, but I shall obey the god rather than you.

We are like people looking for something they have in their hands all the time; we're looking in all directions except at the thing we want, which is probably why we haven't found it.

Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.

The only real ill-doing is the deprivation of knowledge.

Wisdom alone is the science of others sciences.

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