Philo - Soul Quotes

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A far greater glory is it to the wise to die for freedom, the love of which stands in very truth implanted in the soul like nothing else, not as a casual adjunct but an essential part of its unity, and cannot be amputated without the whole system being destroyed as a result.

Philo
There is no sweeter delight than that the soul should be charged through and through with justice, exercising itself in her eternal principles and doctrines and leaving no vacant place into which injustice can make its way.

Philo
They in their desire for health commit themselves to physicians, but these people show no willingness to cast off the soul-sickness of their untrained grossness by resorting to wise men....

Philo
Noble souls, whose brightness the greed of fortune cannot dim, have a kingly something, which urges them to contend on equal footing with persons of the most massive dignity and pits freedom of speech against arrogance.

Philo
Moses … denied to the members of the sacred commonwealth unrestricted liberty to use and partake of the other kinds of food. All the animals of land, sea or air whose flesh is the finest and fattest, thus titillating and exciting the malignant foe pleasure, he sternly forbade them to eat, knowing that they set a trap for the most slavish of the senses, the taste, and produce gluttony, an evil very dangerous both to soul and body.

Philo
If they are unwilling to give, they should at least lend with all readiness and alacrity, not with the prospect of receiving anything back except the principal. … In place of the interest which they determine not to accept they receive a further bonus of the fairest and most precious things that human life has to give, mercy neighborliness, charity, magnanimity, a good report and good fame. And what acquisition can rival these? Nay, even the great king will appear as the poorest of men if compared with a single virtue. For his wealth is soulless, buried deep in store-houses and recesses of the earth, but the wealth of virtue lies in the sovereign part of the soul, and the purest part of existence.

Philo
The good man … has learnt to set at naught the injunctions laid upon him by those most lawless rulers of the soul, inspired as he is by his ardent yearning for the freedom whose peculiar heritage it is that it obeys no orders and works no will but its own.

Philo
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.

Philo
The health of the soul is to have its faculties, reason, high spirit and desire happily tempered, with the reason in command and reining in the other two, like restive horses. The special name of this health is temperance, that is σωφροσύνη or thought-preserving, for it creates a preservation of one of our powers, namely that of wise-thinking.

Philo
The holy Moses … discarded passion in general and detesting it, as most vile in itself and in its effects, denounced especially desire as a battery of destruction to the soul, which must be done away with or brought into obedience to the governance of reason, and then all things will be permeated through and through with peace and good order, those perfect forms of the good which bring the full perfection of happy living.

Philo
Bodies have men as their masters, souls their vices and passions.

Philo
God welcomes genuine service, and that is the service of a soul that offers the bare and simple sacrifice of truth; but from false service, the mere display of material wealth, He turns away.

Philo