This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
Socrates was wont to give this advice to young men
that accustomed themselves to their mirrors :—if ill-favored, to correct their deformity by the practice of virtue;
if handsome, not to blemish their outward form with inward vice. In like manner, it would not be amiss for
a mistress of a family, when she holds her mirror in her
hands, to discourse her own thoughts:—if deformed, thus,
Should I prove lewd and wicked too ?—on the other side,
thus the fair one, What if chaste beside ? For it adds a
kind of veneration to a woman not so handsome, that she
is more beloved for the perfections of her mind than the
outside graces of her body.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 2.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.