The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

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.

Then we got into a labyrinth, and, when we thought we were at the end,came out again at the beginning, having still to see as much as ever.

In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by…[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of...

Those who don’t know must learn from those who do.

[…]make sure you raise your children by having them play in their studies, and don’t use force.

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity – I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only...

He who wishes to serve his country must have not only the power to think, but the will to act