Surely anyone with any sense at all will always call upon a god before setting out on any venture, whatever its importance.

Plato, Timaeus, 27c

The Gods are not some sort of supernatural mafia that will whack us unless we pay them off for protection via sacrifices and offerings. This is a common view, but it is wrong.

A man becomes like God when he becomes just and pious, with understanding.

Plato, Theaetetus 176b

"Every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is. As it shares the beliefs and delights of the body, I think it inevitably comes to share its ways and manner of life and is unable ever to reach Hades in a pure state; it is always full of body when it departs, so that it soon falls back into another body and grows with it as if it had been sewn into it."

Plato, Phaedo 83d

The contemplative philosopher knows sensible things insofar as he reduces them from their own plurality to the unity of the intelligible; but since in the intelligible there is not only unity but also plurality, he reduces the unity in the intelligible to the unity that is in God, which is unity proper without multiplicity, for God is nothing but a monad without multiplicity.

Olympiodorus, Commentary on the Phaedo 4.3.7-10

As for sex, you should stay pure before marriage as far as you can, but if you have to indulge, do only what is lawful. However, do not be angry with those who do indulge, or criticise them, and do not boast of the fact that you do not yourself indulge.

If you are told that someone is saying bad things about you, do not defend yourself against what is said, but answer, ‘Obviously this person is ignorant of my other faults, otherwise they would not have mentioned only these ones.’

Epictetus, The Handbook, 33

...The soul has been allotted the second rank of honor [i.e., after the Gods]; third - as everyone will realize - comes the honor naturally due to the body. ... The body that deserves to be honored is not the handsome one or the strong or the swift - nor yet the healthy (though a good many people would think it was); and it is certainly not the one with the opposite qualities to all these. He will say that the body which achieves a mean between all these extreme conditions is by far the soundest and best-balanced, because the one extreme makes the soul bold and boastful, while the other makes it abject and groveling.

Plato, Laws 728d-e

Crush two pounds of cheese in a mixing bowl; when that is thoroughly mashed, add a pound of wheat flour or, if you want the cake to be lighter, just half a pound of fine flour and mix thoroughly with the cheese. Add one egg and mix together well. Make it into a loaf, place it on leaves and bake slowly on a warm hearth under a crock.

Cato the Elder's recipe for sacrificial cakes

"What is the subject of our present enquiry?
'Pleasure.'
Submit it to the standard, put it on the scales. For something to be good, must it be something that we can properly place confidence in and trust in?
'Indeed it must.'
Can we properly place confidence, then, in something that is unstable?
'No.'
Is pleasure stable?
'No, it isn't.'
Away with it, then; take it out of the scales, and drive it away from the realm of good things. But if your sight is none too keen and one set of scales isn't enough for you, bring another. Is the good something that can properly inspire us with pride?
'It is indeed.'
Is the pleasure of the moment, then, something that can properly inspire us with pride? Take care not to say that it is, or I'll no longer regard you as being worthy of even using the scales!"

Epictetus, Discourses 2.11

When you consider the nature of every body, what, besides the soul, do you think sustains and supports it, so that it lives and moves about?
'There isn't anything.'
What about when you consider the nature of everything else? Don't you agree with Anaxagoras that it is ordered and sustained by mind or soul?
'I do.'

Plato, Cratylus 400a

For all things are known by something similar to them: the sensible by sense perception, the scientific object by science, the intelligible by the intellect, the One by what is like the One. So then, when thinking, the soul knows both itself and what it thinks through ‘touch’, as we said, but when it is transcending thinking, it knows neither itself nor that towards which it directed its own ‘one’.

Proclus, On Providence 31

The chief fruit of piety is to honour God according to the laws of our country, not deeming that God has need of anything, but that He calls us to honour Him by His truly reverend and blessed majesty. We are not harmed by reverencing God's altars, nor benefited by neglecting them. But whoever honours God under the impression that He is in need of him, unconsciously deems himself greater than God. 'Tis not the anger of the gods that injures us, but our own ignorance of their nature. Anger is foreign to the gods, for anger is involuntary, and there is nothing involuntary in God. Do not then dishonour the divine nature by false human opinions, since thou wilt not injure the eternally blessed One, whose immortal nature is incapable of injury, but thou wilt blind thyself to the conception of what is greatest and chiefest.

Porphyry, Letter to Marcella 18

But he who neither perceives by himself nor takes in a lesson from another, he on the other hand is a worthless man.

Hesiod, Works and Days

Those who weep and lament, besides not being able to recover what they have lost, or recall to life those that are dead, impel the soul to greater perturbations, in consequence of its being filled with much depravity. It is requisite therefore, that, being washed and purified, we should by all possible contrivances wipe away our inveterate stains by the reasonings of philosophy. But we shall accomplish this by adhering to prudence and temperance, being satisfied with our present circumstances, and not aspiring after many things.

Hipparchus, On Tranquility

Just as the bleary, uncleansed eye cannot behold exceeding brightness, so the soul that has not secured virtue is incapable of reflecting the beauty of truth. For it is not lawful for the impure to lay hold of the pure.

Hierocles, Commentary on the Golden Verses Proem

Death, I think, is actually nothing but the separation of two things from each other, the soul and the body.

Plato, Gorgias 524b

If you aren't practicing, you're just an unpaid academic!

One of the most damaging mischaracterizations of Platonic metaphysics is the idea that the material world is a "copy" of the divine immaterial world. While it is not totally wrong to speak in terms of copy, it can be misleading. Far from being a mere copy, our world is forever participating in the divine - to be sure, its participation is temporal and imperfect, but the key point is that it is an ongoing expression of divinity. The language of "copy" tends to degrade the universe whereas the correct understanding of participation actually elevates it.

Our motto, as everyone knows, is to live in conformity with nature: it is quite contrary to nature to torture one’s body… Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.

Seneca, Letter 5

The soul is divided into reasoning power, anger and desire. Reasoning power rules knowledge, anger deals with impulse, and desire bravely rules the soul’s affections. When these three parts unite into one action, exhibiting a composite energy, then in the soul results concord and virtue. When sedition divides them, then appear discord and vice. Virtue therefore contains three elements; reason, power, and deliberate choice. The soul’s reasoning power’s virtue is prudence, which is a habit of contemplating and judging. The irascible part’s virtue is fortitude; which is a habit of enduring dreadful things, and resisting them. The appetitive part’s virtue is temperance; which is a moderation and detention of the pleasures which arise from the body. The whole soul’s virtue is justice; for men indeed become bad either through vice, or through incontinence, or through a natural ferocity. They injure each other either through gain, pleasure or ambition. More appropriately therefore does vice
belong to the soul’s reasoning part. While prudence is similar to good art, vice resembles bad art, inventing contrivances to act unjustly. Incontinence pertains to the soul’s appetitive part, as continence consists in subduing, and incontinence in failure to subdue pleasures. Ferocity belongs to the soul’s irascible part, for when someone activated by evil desires is gratified not as a man should be, but as a beast would be, then this is called ferocity.

The effects of these dispositions also result from the things for the sake of which they are performed. Vice, hailing from the soul’s reasoning part results in avarice; the irascible part’s fault is ambition, which results in ferocity; and as the appetitive part ends in pleasure, this generates incontinence. As unjust actions are the results of so many causes, so also are just deeds; for virtue is a naturally beneficent and profitable as vice is maleficent and harmful.

Theages, On the Virtues

'Plato knew as well as the Scholastic philosophers that the artist as such has no moral responsibilities, and can sin as an artist only if he fails to consider the sole good of the work to be done, whatever it may be.*1

But like Cicero, Plato also knows that “though he is an artist, he is nevertheless a man”*2 and, if a free man, responsible as such for whatever it may be that he undertakes to make; a man who, if he represents what ought not to be represented and brings into being things unworthy of free men, should be punished, or at the least restrained or exiled like any other criminal or madman.

It is precisely those poets or other artists who imitate anything and everything, and are not ashamed to represent or even “idealize” things essentially base, that Plato, without respect for their abilities, however great, would banish from the society of rational men, “lest from the imitation of shameful things men should imbibe their actuality,”*3.' - Ananda Coomaraswamy

*1 Laws 670E; Sum Theol. 1.91.3, I-II.57 ad 2.
*2 Cicero, Pro quinctio xxv.78.
*3 Republic 395c; cf 395-401, esp. 401BC, 605-607, and Laws 656c.