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Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics.
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Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.
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The makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit.
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We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
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Knowledge is true opinion.
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Arguments derived from probabilities are idle.
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Those having torches will pass them on to others.
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In the world of knowledge, the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with effort.
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Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
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Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.
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Wisdom alone is the science of other sciences.
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But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.
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It is impossible to conceive of many without one.
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Adultery is the injury of nature.
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If one has made a mistake, and fails to correct it, one has made a greater mistake.
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Better to be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root of all misfortune.
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It is as expedient that a wicked man be punished as that a sick man be cured by a physician; for all chastisement is a kind of medicine.
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If we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself.
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Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.
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We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know -- or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know.
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Train children not by compulsion but as if they were playing.
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He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.
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Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.
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There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.