Excellence" is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice.
We do not act "rightly" because we are "excellent",
in fact we achieve "excellence" by acting "rightly".
He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, to effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.
And is it not true that in like manner a leader of the people who, getting control of a docile mob, does not withhold his hand from the shedding of tribal blood, but by the customary unjust accusations brings a citizen into court and assassinates him, blotting out a human life, and with unhallowed tongue and lips that have tasted kindred blood, banishes and slays and hints at the abolition of debts and the partition of lands.
Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away. . . . A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons hiom.
Education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul and take strongest hold upon it
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.