255 definitions
The book's index
Lectures and Sayings
185 concepts · 255 definitions
- acceptance1
- admiration1
- advice1
- agriculture1
- animal1
- appetite1
- applause1
- argument3
- assault1
- audience1
- beard1
- Blessedness1
- body1
- borrowing1
- brother1
- brotherhood1
- character1
- charlatan1
- childlessness1
- children2
- clothing1
- comfort1
- company1
- conjugal love1
- contempt1
- contentment1
- control1
- cookbook1
- corruption1
- Country1
- courage2
- courtship1
- crowd1
- death2
- defiance1
- delicacy1
- digestion1
- Diogenes1
- disagreement1
- discomfort1
- disobedience1
- doctrine1
- double standard1
- earth1
- eating2
- eccentricity1
- education2
- effeminacy1
- effort1
- endurance1
- enemy1
- envy1
- evil1
- example1
- exile9
- extravagance1
Philosophy (n.) needs more practice than medicine because its student arrives already corrupted, unlike the apprentice of any other craft.
Philosophy (n.) is taught in a doctor's office: you should leave the school not pleased but pained.
Philosophy (n.) is the care of country, father, brothers and friends, for whoever reasons with care takes care of them all.
Philosophy (n.) is the study of how to live honorably, and so to ask whether women may do it is to ask whether women may be good.
Exile (n.) can act as a cure: it forced the soft to live austerely and so healed chests and gout that luxury had brought on.
Exile (n.) merely sorts your friends: the true ones stay and the false ones you are better off without.
Exile (n.) hands a person leisure: no summons to public duty, no false friends, no relatives skilled at distracting him from better things.
Exile (n.) improves people and so helps them more than it hurts them, in body and in soul.
Marriage (n.) is a union in which everything is common, nothing private, not even the body itself.
Marriage (n.) is a contest each spouse competes to win, in giving the other care in sickness and health.
Marriage (n.) needs harmony, and harmony needs virtue, so the souls best suited to wedlock are those inclined to self-control and justice.
Marriage (n.) did not hinder Pythagoras, Socrates or Crates; Crates, with no home, spent his nights with his wife in the public colonnades.
Luxury (n.) is worse than sickness: illness harms the body alone, but luxurious living harms body and soul both.
Luxury (n.) makes a man shrink from hardship for city, friends and gods alike, and so unjust in every direction.
Luxury (n.) makes the mind deaf to plain reasoning: a pampered youth must be pried loose from error by a thousand words.
Luxury (n.) drives those who pursue it, in private and in public, to countless wicked and deadly acts.
Virtue (n.) is the one skill we demand of everyone without having taught it to anyone, which shows we assume it was born in us.
Virtue (n.) is native to every human being, as the law shows by punishing the weak and strong, old and young alike.
Virtue (n.) is the only craft that everyone claims to own without ever having apprenticed to anyone.
Virtue (n.) has no sex: a foolish man is as useless as a foolish woman, and an unjust woman wrongs her husband as surely as an unjust man wrongs the city.
A Philosopher (n.) needs no old cloak, no missing tunic, no long hair, no oddness; he needs only to contemplate what it is to do right.
A Philosopher (n.) is king even with no subjects, since it is enough that he rules his friends, his household, or himself alone.
A Philosopher (n.) who avoids marriage and the city's growth cares less for his city and his fellow man than a married father does.
A Philosopher (n.) who cannot scorn blows and jeers is useless, since he must show he scorns even death.
A King (n.) is meant to be the law that lives and breathes, flawless in word and deed, a father to those he rules as Zeus is father to all.
A King (n.) weak in argument will be forced to accept falsehoods as true, and so philosophy equips him as weapons equip him in battle.
A King (n.) has a better reason than anyone to study philosophy, simply because he is a king.
A King (n.) who cannot rule his own desires cannot make others self-controlled, and laxness destroys ruler and private citizen alike.
Pain (n.) is chosen by everyone; the only question is whether you take it on for the better things or the worse ones.
Pain (n.) is the road to everything good, so the man unwilling to endure it all but condemns himself to be worth nothing good.
Pain (n.) is endured daily by the lover, the money-seeker and the glory-hunter for worse ends; the shame is that we will not bear it for the good.
An Argument (n.) exists only for what is hidden; to a god, to whom nothing is unclear, it would be an idle ornament.
An Argument (n.) is a bridge from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it carries you to what you cannot see from what you cannot doubt.
An Argument (n.) demanded at length for what is already plain marks the listener as absurd and dull, not rigorous.
Reason (n.) must be kept in the soul like food, not discarded like hellebore after it has treated an illness.
Reason (n.) works by striking out the wicked judgments embedded in the soul by misperception and putting healthy ones in their place.
Reason (n.) is nature's overseer and guide, the only cure for the ignorance and lack of self-control that keep us from an orderly life.