"And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?"

What is good, PhÊdrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

A single thought begins to grow in his mind, extracted from something he read in the dialogue Phædrus. "And what is written well and what is written badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?"
What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good—need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Socrates: ...Can you point out any compelling rhetorical reason why he should have put his arguments together in the order that he has?
Phaedrus: You do me too much honour if you suppose that I am capable of divining his motives so exactly.

Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

Socrates: But suppose the words used are ‘just’ and ‘good’. Don’t we then go each his own way, and find ourselves in disagreement with ourselves as well as with each other?
Phaedrus: Undoubtedly.

One may quote bad poetry if it is by a great poet.

And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good — Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

In writing what he does not speak, what he would never say and, in truth, would probably never even think, the author of the written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist; the man of non-presence and non-truth. Writing is thus already on the scene. The incompatibility between written and the true is clearly announced at the moment Socrates starts to recount the way in which men are carried out themselves by pleasure, become absent from themselves, forget themselves and die in the thrill of song.

The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels prepared to take them.

On peut citer de mauvais vers, quand ils sont d'un grand poète.

"Someone might say: " Are you not ashamed, Socrates, to have followed the kind of occupation that has led to your being now in danger of death?" Howeverm, I should be right to reply to him: "You are wrong, sir, if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting like a good or bad man

When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry, I find.

In his discussions of such matters as "What is justice?" or "What is virtue?" he took the attitude that he knew nothing and had to be instructed by others. (This is called "Socratic irony," for Socrates knew very well that he knew a great deal more than the poor souls he was picking on.) By pretending ignorance, Socrates lured others into propounding their views on such abstractions. Socrates then, by a series of ignorant-sounding questions, forced the others into such a mélange of self-contradictions that they would finally break down and admit they didn't know what they were talking about.

It is the mark of the marvelous toleration of the Athenians that they let this continue for decades and that it wasn't till Socrates turned seventy that they broke down and forced him to drink poison.