Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?

When you want success as badly as you want the air, then you will get it. There is no other secret of success.

The soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations; these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

Let us reflect in this way, too, that there is good hope that death is a blessing, for it is one of two things: either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocation for the soul from here to another place.

The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.