The Just City Quotes

“Know Thyself. It’s good advice. Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them the space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep on pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can, and become the best self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds. Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Let’s pursue excellence together. Let’s make art. Let’s build the future. Let’s be our best selves.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“You don’t want anything from them except for them to exist and you to see them sometimes and talk to them, and maybe for them to like you back.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“There will always be some who see excellence and envy it instead of striving to emulate it.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“You can’t trust everything that ass Plato wrote,” Sokrates said.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“We cannot change what has happened. We go on from where we stand. Not even Necessity knows all ends.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Nothing mortal can last. At best it can leave legends that can bear fruit in later ages.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“What was interesting was seeing how much of it could work, how much it really would maximize justice, and how it was going to fail. We could learn a lot from that.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them the space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep on pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can, and become the best self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds.Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Peace is better than war. There’s too much glorification of war and not enough glorification of peace, and especially not enough glorification of the importance of the doves.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“I love you like stones fall downwards, like the sun rises.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“That everyone is of equal significance and that the differences between individuals are more important than the differences between broad classes?”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Everyone had their own internal life and their own soul, and they were entitled to make their own choices.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“There isn’t an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“What made him imagine he could have a dialogue with them?” “He’s Sokrates,” I said. “He’s like a two-year-old sticking pencils in his ear,” she said.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“And what he had offered me was exactly everything I most wanted —to make art, to build the future, to help each other become our best selves. “He honors me.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“She turned into a tree. It was a Mystery. It must have been. Nothing else made sense, because I didn't understand it.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“For that is to be my purpose here, you see, to teach rhetoric to you children: I, who was never a teacher but who liked to converse with my friends and seek out the nature of things.”

“They have their own imagination of who you are, but you are not that,” Kebes said.

“Now that’s true,” Sokrates said. “And perhaps what I shall teach is not what they expect me to teach.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Maybe some of the masters really believed they could make it work, but I think what they really wanted wasn’t to do it themselves but for somebody else to have made it real and for them to have been born there.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“There isn’t an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.” She”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“I still don’t know if you understand!” “That everyone is of equal significance and that the differences between individuals are more important than the differences between broad classes? Oh yes, I’m coming to understand that really well.” I”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“But imagine how he’d feel if you said that to him. It’s not considering him as a person but as part of a class of inferior things.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them the space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep on pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can, and become the best self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds. Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Our souls know harmony and proportion before we are born, so although I had never seen anything like it, my soul resonated at once to the beauty of the city. Immediately”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Without heads, where might they keep their minds, if they have them?” Kebes put in. “In their livers, obviously,” Sokrates said.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“On my temple in Delphi there are two words written: Know Thyself. It’s good advice. Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them the space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep on pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can, and become the self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds. Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“I wanted to experience being a mortal. I wanted to learn about volition and equal significance.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City

“Nothing in the Republic is anything I ever said, or thought, or dreamed. The Apology is fairly accurate, as is the account of the drinking party after Agathon’s first victory at the Dionysia. But even there Plato was inclined to let his imagination get the better of him.”
― Jo Walton, The Just City