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Do not expect justice where might is right.
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Now nothing can be more important than that the work of a soldier should be well done.
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The honour of parents is a fair and noble treasure to their posterity, but to have the use of a treasure of wealth and honour, and to leave none to your successors, because you have neither money nor reputation of your own, is alike base and dishonourable.
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You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?
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Our love for our children springs from the soul's greatest yearning for immortality.
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Art has no end but its own perfection.
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The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable.
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And tell him it's quite true that the best of the philosophers are of no use to their fellows; but that he should blame, not the philosophers, but those who fail to make use of them.
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Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable, inasmuch as he has the fountain of reason in him not yet regulated.
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I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency.
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Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.
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I am not given to finding fault, for there are innumerable fools.
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Everything desires not like but unlike: for example, the dry desires the moist, the cold the hot, the bitter the sweet, the sharp the blunt, the void the full, the full the void, and so of all other things; for the opposite is the food of the opposite, whereas like receives like receives nothing from like.
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A State would be happy where philosophers were kings, or kings philosophers.
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Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.
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A wise ignorance is an essential part of knowledge.
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Music is a more potent instrument than any other for education.
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All loves should be simply stepping stones to the love of God. So it was with me; and blessed be his name for his great goodness and mercy.
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...there are some who are naturally fitted for philosophy and political leadership, while the rest should follow their lead and let philosophy alone.
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You cannot conceive the many without the one.
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So the well educated man can learn to sing and dance well.
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No one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong -- only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that way. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong, for that which is done cannot be undone, but he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again.
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Wonder is the beginning of the desire to know the beautiful and the good.
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Vision, in my view, is the cause of the greatest benefit to us, inasmuch as none of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heavens. But as it is, the vision of day and night and of months and circling years has created the art of number and has given us not only the notion of Time but also means of research into the nature of the Universe. From these we have procured Philosophy in all its range, than which no greater boon ever has come or will come, by divine bestowal, unto the race of mortals.