As parents in private life teach wisdom to their children, so do [poets] in public life to their cities. - Philo of Alexandria

The majority, who through the blindness of their reason do not discern the damages which the soul has sustained, only feel the pain of external injuries, because the faculty of judgment, which alone can enable them to apprehend the damage to the mind, is taken from them.

And yet these things for which we should strive eagerly, things so closely akin to ourselves, so truly our own, we treat with great slackness and constant indifference and thus destroy the germs of excellence, while those things in which deficiency were a merit we desire with an insatiable yearning.

The legislator of the Jews in a bolder spirit went to a further extreme and in the practice of his “naked” philosophy, as they call it, ventured to speak of him who was possessed by love of the divine.