What most counts is not to live, but to live aright.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways-I to die, and you to live. Which is the better, God only knows.

Nobody knows, in fact, what death is, nor whether to man it is not perchance the greatest of all blessings; yet people fear it as if they surely knew it to be the worst of evils.

In every sort of danger there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever.

The nearest way to glory-a short cut, as it were-is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.

Living or dead, to a good man there can come no evil.

One ought not to return injustice, nor do evil to anybody in the world, no matter what one may have suffered from them.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.

The unexamined life is not worth living.