The untrained mind keeps up a running commentary, labelling everything, judging everything. Best to ignore that commentary. Don't argue or resist, just ignore. Deprived of attention and interest, this voice gets quieter and quieter and eventually just shuts up.

Some suggestions for you :

In my opinion it's preferable for me to be a musician with an out-of-tune lyre or a choir-leader with a cacophonous choir, and it's preferable for almost everyone in the world to find my beliefs misguided and wrong, rather than for just one person - me - to contradict and clash with myself.

It's like this, I think: the excellence of a good body doesn't make the soul good, but the other way around: the excellence of a good soul makes the body as good as it can be.

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity – I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.

Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.

But whether the just have a better and happier life than the unjust is a further question which we also proposed to consider.

Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.

SOCRATES: But you do say that he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general. ION: Certainly.

Knowledge unqualified is knowledge simply of something learned.

I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long …arousing and persuading and reproaching…You will not easily find another like me.

Let the speaker speak truly and the judge decide justly.

The rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know.

There is a constant suspicion that headache and giddiness are to be ascribed to philosophy, and hence all practising or making trial of virtue in the higher sense is absolutely stopped; for a man is always fancying that he is being made ill, and is in constant anxiety about the state of his body.