If you will be guided by me, you will make little account of Socrates, and much more of truth.

Either I do not corrupt the young or, if I do, it is unwillingly.

Creation is man's immortality and brings him nearest to the gods.

If you can do only a little. Do what you can. What you cannot enforce, do not command.

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

In order that the mind should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can learn to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the good. Hence there may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing.