"Is there a perfect world?"

"Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave had kings among his ancestors."

"This feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy."

"Love is of the beautiful, and therefore has not the beautiful. And the beautiful is the good, and therefore, in wanting and desiring the beautiful, love also wants and desires the good."

"It's not at all uncommon to find a person's desires compelling him to go against his reason, and to see him cursing himself and venting his passion on the source of the compulsion within him. It's as if there were two warring factions, with passion fighting on the side of reason."

"The souls of people, on their way to Earth-life, pass through a room full of lights; each takes a taper, often only a spark, to guide it in the dim country of this world. But some souls, by rare fortune, are detained longer, have time to grasp a handful of tapers, which they weave into a torch. These are the torch-bearers of humanity, its poets, seers, and saints, who lead and lift the race out of darkness, toward the light. They are the law-givers and saviors, the light-bringers, way-showers and truth-tellers, and without them, humanity would lose its way in the dark."

"Will life be worth having, if that higher part of man be destroyed, which is improved by justice and depraved by injustice?"

"Those who tell the stories rule society."

"Certainly we shall have to look to ourselves, and try to find someone who will help in some way or other to improve us."

"The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and hope..."

"Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves or their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others."

"States are as the men, they grow out of human characters."

"null"

"It seems to me that many fall into it even against their will, and fancy they are discussing, when they are merely debating, because they cannot distinguish the meanings of a term, in their investigation of any question, but carry on their opposition to what is stated, by attacking the mere words, employing the art of debate, and not that of philosophical discussion."

"Those whose hearts are fixed on reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers."

"There are three arts which are concerned with all things. One which uses, another which makes, and a third which imitates them."

"Is there anything worse for a state than to be split and disunited? or better than cohesion and unity?"

"The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant."

"No tools will make a man a skilled workmen, or master of defense, or be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them and has never bestowed any attention on them."

"No man should bring children into world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education."