One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
The blame is his who chooses: God is blameless.
Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.
Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.
Science is nothing but perception.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
It is right to give every man his due.
Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.
Courage is a kind of salvation.
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.
When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.
Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.
Philosophy is the highest music.
Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.
Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
The gods' service is tolerable, man's intolerable.
Those who intend on becoming great should love neither themselves nor their own things, but only what is just, whether it happens to be done by themselves or others.
It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.
Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.
There is no such thing as a lovers' oath.
The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it's almost impossible to stamp out.
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.
When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.
To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.
For good nurture and education implant good constitutions.
Then not only an old man, but also a drunkard, becomes a second time a child.
All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.
There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.
Knowledge is true opinion.
Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.