"We cannot live better than in seeking to become better."

"In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep."

"God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us."

"Those who are hardest to love need it the most."

"Man's greatest privilege is the discussion of virtue."

"A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true."

"Beloved Pan and all other gods, who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and the inner man be at one."

"The answer I gave myself and the oracle was that it was to my advantage to be as I am."

"For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles."

"The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms."