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The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
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The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
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Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
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For good is simple, evil manifold.
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It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace.
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Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment.
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For contemplation is both the highest form of activity, since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects that it apprehends are the highest things that can be known, and also it is the most continuous, because we are more capable of continuous contemplation than we are of any practical activity.
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When you feel yourself lacking something, send your thoughts towards your Intimate and search for the Divinity that lives within you.
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And of course, the brain is not responsible for any of the sensations at all. The correct view is that the seat and source of sensation is the region of the heart.
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Friendship is two souls inhabiting one body.
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Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers.
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It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.
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The beginning, as the proverb says, is half the whole.
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Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit.
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Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.
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A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
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Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.
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I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.
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How strange it is that Socrates, after having made the children common, should hinder lovers from carnal intercourse only, but should permit love and familiarities between father and son or between brother and brother, than which nothing can be more unseemly, since even without them love of this sort is improper. How strange, too, to forbid intercourse for no other reason than the violence of the pleasure, as though the relationship of father and son or of brothers with one another made no difference.
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The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy.
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Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action.
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Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.
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Men are divided between those who are as thrifty as if they would live forever, and those who are as extravagant as if they were going to die the next day.
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The blood of a goat will shatter a diamond.