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Quote bank
Miscellaneous
Lysias was entertaining you with his eloquence, I suppose?
We must realize that in each one of us there are two ruling and impelling principles whose guidance we follow, a desire for pleasure, which is innate, and an acquired conviction which causes us to aim at excellence.
The conviction which impels us towards excellence is rational, and the power by which it masters us is called self control; the desire which drags us towards pleasure is irrational, and when it gets the upper hand in us its dominion is called excess.
Your passion for rhetoric, Phaedrus, is super-human, simply amazing.
Unless he becomes an adequate philosopher he will never be an adequate speaker either on any subject
But of this region beyond the skies no mortal poet has sung or will sing in such strains as it deserves
Love is a god
Madness
Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings
Madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human
But of this region beyond the skies no mortal poet has sung or will sing in such strains as it deserves
Because he stands apart from the common objects of human ambition and applies himself to the divine, he is reproached by most men for being out of his wits; they do not realize that he is in fact possessed by a god.
There are two types of madness, one arising from human disease, the other when heaven sets us free from established convention
Writing
It shows great folly - as well as ignorance of the pronouncement of Ammon - to suppose that one can transmit or acquire clear and certain knowledge of an art through the medium of writing.
Writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers.
Written speech might fairly be called a shadow
Nothing worth serious attention has ever been written in prose or verse
rhetoric and writing in the phaedrus
analysis of phaedrus