"The easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves."

"If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart."

"And now we go, you to your lives, and I to death, and which of us goes to the better only God knows."

"He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature."

"To express one badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul."

"Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people."

"For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles."

"Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."

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

"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher ... and that is a good thing for any man."

"From the deepest desires often comes the deadliest hate."

"Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers."

"And therefore if the head and the body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first and essential thing. And the care of the soul, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance comes and stays, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body."

"I thought that as I had failed in the contemplation of true existence, I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul; as people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of looking at the image reflected in the water, or in some similar medium. ...I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried by the help of my senses to apprehend them. And I thought that I had better had recourse to ideas, and seek in them truth in existence. I dare to say that the simile is not perfect--for I am far from admitting that he who contemplates existence through the medium of ideas, sees them only "through a glass darkly," any more than he who sees them in their working and effects."

"Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one."

"If you want to be a good saddler, saddle the worst horse; for if you can tame one, you can tame all."

"And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls."

"Be slow to fall into friendship, but when you are in, continue firm and constant."

"As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent."

"An unconsidered life is not one worth living."