Plato: Letters to my Son

An eagle's old age is better than the youth of a sparrow. Greek proverb If ever I have achieved anything that might outlive me, it was not for the support and encouragement of my ageing uncles or anyone else in my family, but because I had the courage - they might say the temerity - to resist and defy them whenever they tried to return me to the hackneyed path that I had chosen to leave, and that, in the end, led to their perdition. The hardest thing in life is not to have a vision, for even my uncles once had a vision, but to live it out, to make the hard choices, for the greater good, whatever the costs might seem.