“The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.”

What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

You shouldn’t feel sorry for the lifestyle you haven’t tasted, but for the one you are about to lose.

Concessions to adversaries only end in self reproach, and the more strictly they are avoided the greater will be the chance of security.

Three of the gravest failings, want of sense, of courage, or of vigilance.

Amassing of wealth is an opportunity for good deeds, not hubris.

Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.

For they had learned that true safety was to be found in long previous training, and not in eloquent exhortations uttered when they were going into action.

Few things are brought to a successful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought.

It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.

They whose minds are least sensitive to calamity, and whose hands are most quick to meet it, are the greatest men and the greatest communities.

Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and respect of self, in turn, is the chief element in courage.

Men’s indignation, it seems, is more exited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

Now the only sure basis of an alliance is for each party to be equally afraid of the other.

When tremendous dangers are involved, no one can be blamed for looking to his own interest.

Knowledge without understanding is useless.

All human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas.

Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

When I spoke of “beauty”, I was thinking of Rilke’s notion that the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, and of Hölderlin’s idea that the beautiful can unite extreme opposites in intimacy.

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.

Why is it that when the story ends we begin to feel all of it?

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.