[536] Compare "How One may be aware of one's Progress in Virtue," § xiv.
[537] For as the English proverb says, "Hatred is blind as well as love."
[538] "Laws," v. p. 728 A.
[539] Quoted more fully "How One may be aware of one's Progress in Virtue," § vi.
[540] "Laws," v. p. 731 E. See also above, [§ vii.]
ON TALKATIVENESS.[541]
§ i. Philosophy finds talkativeness a disease very difficult and hard to cure. For its remedy, conversation, requires hearers: but talkative people hear nobody, for they are ever prating. And the first evil this inability to keep silence produces is an inability to listen. It is a self-chosen deafness of people who, I take it, blame nature for giving us one tongue and two ears. If then the following advice of Euripides to a foolish hearer was good,
"I cannot fill one that can nought retain, Pumping up wise words for an unwise man;"