Women who are with child should be careful of themselves; they should take exercise and have a nourishing diet. The first of these prescriptions the legislator will easily carry into effect by requiring that they should take a walk daily to some temple, where they can worship the gods who preside over birth. Their minds, however, unlike their bodies, they ought to keep quiet, for the offspring derive their natures from their mothers as plants do from earth.
It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.
Youth should be kept strangers to all that is bad, and especially to things which suggest vice or hate. When the five years have passed away, during the two following years they must look on at the pursuits which they are hereafter to learn. There are two periods of life with reference to which education has to be divided, from seven to the age of puberty, and onwards to the age of one and twenty.
Knowledge above the average can be crammed into the average man, but it remains dead, and in the last analysis sterile knowledge. The result is a man who may be a living dictionary but nevertheless falls down miserably in all special situations and decisive moments in life.
I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
The same things are best both for individuals and for states, and these are the things which the legislator ought to implant in the minds of his citizens.
The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.