- A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.
- All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.
- Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.
- At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
- Attention to health is life greatest hindrance.
- Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.
- Courage is a kind of salvation.
- Courage is knowing what not to fear.
- Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom.
- Democracy... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
- Democracy passes into despotism.
- Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments.
- Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
- He was a wise man who invented beer.
- 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.
- Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.
- How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?
- I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
- It is right to give every man his due.
- Knowledge is true opinion.
- Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
- Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.
- Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
- Man - a being in search of meaning.
- Moderation, which consists in an indifference about little things, and in a prudent and well-proportioned zeal about things of importance, can proceed from nothing but true knowledge, which has its foundation in self-acquaintance.
- Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
- Necessity... the mother of invention.
- No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.
- Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.
- Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
- One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
- Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
- Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
- Science is nothing but perception.
- That politician who curries favor with the citizens and indulges them and fawns upon them and has a presentiment of their wishes, and is skillful in gratifying them, he is esteemed a great statesman.
- The beginning is the most important part of the work.
- The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
- The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.
- The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
- The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.
- The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.
- Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded.
- There are two things a person should never be angry at, what they can help, and what they cannot.
- There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.
- They certainly give very strange names to diseases.
- They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.
- Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself.
- This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
- This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.
- Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
- To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.
- We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
- When a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation, whether it's to young men or not, something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don't want to be separated from one another, no even for a moment. No one would think it is the intimacy of sex - that mere sex is the reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in being with the other.
- When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.
- When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
- When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
- Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
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