“Under every stone lurks a politician.”

You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.

First listen, my friend, and then you may shriek and bluster.

Do not bandy words with your father, nor treat him as a dotard, nor reproach the old man, who has cherished you, with his age.

A man should be able to stand up under any disaster for his country’s good.

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue.

Times change. The vices of your age are stylish today.

Woman is adept at getting money for herself and will not easily let herself be deceived; she understands deceit too well herself.

To plunder, to lie, to show your arse, are three essentials for climbing high.

Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.

Do not take a blind guide.

Open your mind before your mouth.

You possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.

A slave is but half a man.

What unlooked-for things do happen, to be sure, in a long life!

An ancient tradition declares that every idiot blunder we pass into law will sooner or later redound to Athens’ profit.

Evil events from evil causes spring, And what you suffer flows from what you’ve done.

Every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

All of us have wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.

My original appearance now is impure and that is why I try so hard to hide it from everyone harder than I work on keeping myself alive.

Another hidden sacrifice, one of great spiritual beauty and of powerful efficacy in the healing of human sorrows.

Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance.

She had blue skin. And so did he. He kept it hid, And so did she. They searched for blue their whole life through, Then passed right by – And never knew.

We were playing hide and seek with our shadows simply pretending to grasp for love we could not find in ourselves.