So where it is a general rule that it is wrong to gratify lovers, this can be attributed to the defects of those who make that rule: the government's lust for rule and the subjects' cowardice.
He who has followed the path of love's initiation in the proper order will on arriving at the end suddenly perceive a marvelous beauty, the source of all our efforts
Even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.
The true lover of knowledge naturally strives for truth, and is not content with common opinion, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the essential nature of things.
The State which we have founded must possess the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, discipline and justice ... Justice is the principle which has in fact been followed throughout, the principle of one man one job, of minding one s own business , in the sense of doing the job for which one is naturally fitted and not interfering with other people.
Thinking and spoken discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.
Justice in the individual is now defined analogously to justice in the state. The individual is wise and brave in virtue of his reason and spirit respectively: he is disciplined when spirit and appetite are in proper subordination to reason. He is just in virtue of the harmony which exists when all three elements of the mind perform their proper function and so achieve their proper fulfillment; he is unjust when no such harmony exists.
For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
Do you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the pains, near and distant, and weigh them, and then say which outweighs the other? If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, then you choose that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant, whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful.