Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the results of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way?

Well then, Protagoras, we’re also stating opinions of a human being, or rather of all human beings, and claiming that no one at all does not consider himself wiser than others in some respects and other people wiser than himself in other respects, and in the greatest dangers at least, when people are in distress in military campaigns or diseases or at sea, they have the same relation to those who rule them in each situation as to gods, expecting them to be their saviors, even though they are no different from themselves by any other thing than by knowing; and all human things are filled with people seeking teachers and rulers for themselves and for the other animals, as well as for their jobs, and in turn with people who suppose themselves to be competent to teach and competent to rule. And in all these situations, what else are we going to say but that human beings themselves consider there to be wisdom and lack of understanding than among them?

‘In the first place,’ I said, ‘the man who is to take it [philosophy] up must not be lame in his love of labor, loving half the labor while having no taste for the other half. This is the case when a man is a lover of gymnastic and the hunt and loves all the labor done by the body, while he isn’t a lover of learning or of listening and isn’t an inquirer, but hates the labor involved in all that. Lame as well is the man whose love of labor is directed exclusively to the other extreme.’

For we never, for example, become mathematicians by remembering all the demonstrations of others unless we are also capable of solving any kind of problem that may be proposed, nor do we become philosophers by reading all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, for if we cannot ourselves reach a firm judgment concerning whatever it at issue, it would appear that we are not devoting ourselves to science, but to history.

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.