Plutarch

References for Theme: Plutarch

Plutarch's Lives: Volume III (1916)
(p.5) (Pericles) Labour with one’s own hands on lowly tasks gives witness, in the toil thus expended on useless things, to one’s own indifference to higher things. No generous youth, from seeing the Zeus at Pisa, or the Hera at Argos, longs to be Pheidias or Polycleitus; nor to be Anacreon or Philetas or Archilochus out of pleasure in their poems. For it does not of necessity follow that, if the work delights you with its grace, the one who wrought it is worthy of your esteem. Wherefore the spectator is not advantaged by those things at sight of which no...
Plutarch's Moralia, Volume X (1936)
(p.29) (That a Philosopher Ought to Converse Especially with Men in Power) In clasping Sorcanus to your bosom, in prizing, pursuing, welcoming, and cultivating his friendship—a friendship which will prove useful and fruitful to many in private and to many in public life—you are acting like a man who loves what is noble, who is public-spirited and is a friend of mankind, not, as some people say, like one who is merely ambitious for himself. No, on the contrary, the man who is ambitious for himself and afraid of every whisper is just the one who avoids and fears being called...