Xenophon, Memorabilia of Socrates 11

. . . To this the poet is a witness, who says: 

"From the noble thou shalt be instructed in nobleness; but, and if thou minglest with the base, thou wilt destroy what wisdom thou hast now." 

And he who says: 

"But the good man has his hour of baseness as well as his hour of virtue." 

To whose testimony I would add my own. For I see that it is impossible to remember a long poem without practice and repetition; so is forgetfulness of the words of instruction engendered in the heart that has ceased to value them. 

With the words of warning fades the recollection of the very condition of mind in which the soul yearned after holiness; and once forgetting this, what wonder that the man should let slip also the memory of virtue itself! 

Again I see that a man who falls into habits of drunkenness or plunges headlong into licentious love, loses his old power of practising the right and abstaining from the wrong. 

Many a man who has found frugality easy whilst passion was cold, no sooner falls in love than he loses the faculty at once, and in his prodigal expenditure of riches he will no longer withhold his hand from gains which in former days were too base to invite his touch. 

Where then is the difficulty of supposing that a man may be temperate today, and tomorrow the reverse; or that he who once has had it in his power to act virtuously may not quite lose that power? 

To myself, at all events, it seems that all beautiful and noble things are the result of constant practice and training; and preeminently the virtue of temperance, seeing that in one and the same bodily frame pleasures are planted and spring up side by side with the soul and keep whispering in her ear, "Have done with self-restraint, make haste to gratify us and the body!" 

—from Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.2 

IMAGE: John St. John Long, The Temptation in the Wilderness (1824)