This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Then again, that is most useful which is no way
detrimental. Now fire easily becomes most pernicious,
but the nature of water is never prejudicial. In the next
place, that is most useful which affords the benefit which
it brings with least expense, and without any preparation.
But the benefit of fire requires cost and materials, and
therefore the rich make more use of it than the poor, and
princes than private persons; but water has that kindness
for mankind, that it freely offers itself to all alike, a benefit
perfect in itself, indigent of nothing, and wanting neither
tools nor implements.
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. 5.
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.