My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.

Those who will not reason
Perish in the act:
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Art is born of humiliation.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

Now is the age of anxiety.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.

The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

You know there are no secrets in America. It’s quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– In Memory of WB Yeats

Yesterday, I prepared a dinner for some friends, and we recited the Socratic Prayer from the Phaedrus in lieu of grace, with someone reading the lines of Socrates and someone else that of Phaedrus.

I think I will be sticking with the Socratic Prayer, it is absolutely perfect for a dinner amongst friends.

Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. – Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.
Phaedrus: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.
Socrates: Let us go [eat].

plato_aristotle

In the Republic, having discussed the class of producers and the class of guardians, Socrates goes on to discuss the third and last class of citizen in his ideal State, the class of rulers.

Rulers should be chosen from amongst the guardians after close observation and rigorous testing of their loyalty to the State.

Guardians who are chosen as rulers should receive further education; guardians who are not chosen as rulers should no longer be known as ‘guardians’ but as ‘auxiliaries,’ whose role it is to implement the will of the rulers.

Socrates says that all the citizens should be told a useful lie so as to promote allegiance to the State and enforce its three-tiered social order.

According to this myth of the metals, every citizen is born out of the earth of the State and every other citizen is his brother or sister. Yet God has framed them differently, mixing different metals into their soul: gold for the rulers, silver for the auxiliaries, and brass or iron for the husbandmen and craftsmen.

Children are usually made of the same metal as their parents, but if this is not the case the child must either descend or ascend in the social order. If ever a child made of brass or iron was to become a guardian, the State would be destroyed.

As guardians are made of divine gold and silver, they should have nothing to do with the earthly sorts which have been ‘the source of many unholy deeds’.

Guardians should not have any private property; they should live together in housing provided by the state, and receive from the citizens no more than their daily sustenance.

Guardians may be the happiest of men in spite, or because, of their deprivations, for the arts and crafts are equally liable to degenerate under the influence of wealth as they are under the influence of poverty: ‘the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent’.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.