Dialogues
Kindle Highlights
temperance, justice, courage:
they were our Castor and Pollux,
man to become wise, are you in jest
“The third day hence to fertile Phthia shalt thou go.”
that not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued?
You wish him to be what he is not, and no longer to be what he is?
acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor by practice, then whether it comes
Now you depart in innocence, a sufferer and not a doer of evil; a victim, not of the laws, but of men.
Dear Crito, do you not know that in every profession the inferior sort are numerous and good for nothing, and the good are few and beyond all price:
What followed, Crito, how can I rightly narrate? For not slight is the task of rehearsing infinite wisdom, and therefore, like the poets, I ought to commence my relation with an invocation to Memory and the Muses.
that the many could do the greatest evil; for then they would also be able to do the greatest good—and what a fine thing this would be! But in reality they can do neither; for they cannot make a man either wise or foolish; and whatever they do is the result of chance.
Seeing that all men desire happiness, and happiness, as has been shown, is gained by a use, and a right use, of the things of life, and the right use of them, and good-fortune in the use of them, is given by knowledge—the inference is that everybody ought by all means to try and make himself as wise as he can?
Anyone who does not like us and the city, and who wants to emigrate to a colony or to any other city, may go where he likes, retaining his property. But he who has experience of the manner in which we order justice and administer the state, and still remains, has entered into an implied contract that he will do as we command him.
and even Heracles could not fight against the Hydra, who was a she-Sophist, and had the wit to shoot up many new heads when one of them was cut off; especially when he saw a second monster of a sea-crab, who was also a Sophist, and appeared to have newly arrived from a sea-voyage, bearing down upon him from the left, opening his mouth and biting.
Then, I said, Cleinias, the sum of the matter appears to be that the goods of which we spoke before are not to be regarded as goods in themselves, but the degree of good and evil in them depends on whether they are or are not under the guidance of knowledge: under the guidance of ignorance, they are greater evils than their opposites, inasmuch as they are more able to minister to the evil principle which rules them; and when under the guidance of wisdom and prudence, they are greater goods: but in themselves they are nothing?