The new king [Alexander the Great] should perform acts so important and glorious as would make the poets and musicians of future ages labour and sweat to describe and celebrate him.

Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself.

Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed that one is adversity.

Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord.

It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.

The talkative listen to no one, for they are ever speaking. And the first evil that attends those who know not to be silent is that they hear nothing.

As in the case of painters, who have undertaken to give us a beautiful and graceful figure, which may have some slight blemishes, we do not wish then to pass over such blemishes altogether, nor yet to mark them too prominently. The one would spoil the beauty, and the other destroy the likeness of the picture.