Plato

Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow... even if that someone is yourself!

Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.

...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.

Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

The first and the best victory is to conquer self.

There are few people so stubborn in their atheism who, when danger is pressing in, will not acknowledge the divine power.

There still remain three studies suitable for free man. Arithmetic is one of them.

For though a man should be a complete unbeliever in the being of gods; if he also has a native uprightness of temper, such persons will detest evil in men; their repugnance to wrong disinclines them to commit wrongful acts; they shun the unrighteous and are drawn to the upright.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Science is nothing but perception.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

If the study of all these sciences which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

What the expression is intended to mean, I think, is that there is a better and a worse element in the character of each individual, and that when the naturally better element controls the worse then the man is said to be "master of himself", as a term of praise. But when - as a result of bad upbringing or bad company one s better element is overpowered by the numerical superiority of one s worse impulses, then one is criticized for not being master of oneself and for lack of self control.

That makes me think, my friend, as I have often done before, how natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous when they enter the courts of law as speakers. Those who have knocked about in courts and the like from their youth up seem to me, when compared with those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar pursuits, to be as slaves in breeding compared with freemen.

Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.

Man's music is seen as a means of restoring the soul, as well as confused and discordant bodily afflictions, to the harmonic proportions that it shares with the world soul of the cosmos.

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.