“Virtue is the desire of things honourable and the power of attaining them.”

“if you are willing to reflect on the courage and moderation of other people, you will find them strange...they all consider death a great evil...and the brave among them face death, when they do, for fear of greater evils...therefore, it is fear and terror that make all men brave, except for philosophers. yet it is illogical to be brave through fear and cowardice...what of the moderate among them? is their experience not similar?...they master certain pleasures because they are mastered by others...i fear this is not the right exchange to attain virtue, to exchange pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains, and fears for fears, the greater for the less like coins, but that they only valid currency for which all these things should be exchanged is wisdom.”

“...both wealth and concord decline as possessions become pursued and honored. And virtue perishes with them as well.”

“Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”

“By such reflections and by the continuance in them of a divine nature, th qualities which we have described grew and increased among them; but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power. Zeus, the god of gods, who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honourable race was in a woeful plight, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, whch being placed in the centre of the world, beholds all created things. And when he had called them together, he spake as follows --”

“this is the greatest good to man, to discourse daily on virtue, and other things which you have heard me discussing, examining both myself and others,”

“The evil never attains to any real friendship, either with good or evil.”