“Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.”
“Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.”
“When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.”
“There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.”
“Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.”
“I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.”
“The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.”
“They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.”
“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
“He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.”
“He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.”
“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity.”
“Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.”
“Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.”
“The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.”
“Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.”
“No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.”
“There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.”
“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.”
“The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.”
“Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”
“The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
“There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who when danger is pressing in will not acknowledge the divine power.”
“The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.”
“I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.”
“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.”
“Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.”
“Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.”
“No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.”
“Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.”