He used to laugh at Plato as conceited; accordingly, once when there was a fine procession, seeing a horse neighing, he said to Plato, “I think you too would be a very frisky horse:” and he said this all the more, because Plato kept continually praising the horse. At another time, he had gone to see him when he was ill, and when he saw there a dish in which Plato had been sick, he said, “I see your bile there, but I do not see your conceit.” He used to advise the Athenians to pass a vote that asses were horses; and, as they thought that irrational, he said, “Why, those whom you make generals have never learnt to be really generals, they have only been voted such.”
A man said to him one day, “Many people praise you.” “Why, what evil,” said he, “have I done?” When he turned the rent in his cloak outside, Socrates seeing it, said to him, “I see your vanity through the hole in your cloak.” On another occasion, the question was put to him by some one, as Phanias relates, in his treatise on the Philosophers of the Socratic school, what a man could do to show himself an honourable and a virtuous man; and he replied, “If you attend to those who understand the subject, and learn from them that you ought to shun the bad habits which you have.” Some one was praising luxury in his hearing, and he said, “May the children of my enemies be luxurious.” Seeing a young man place himself in a carefully studied attitude before a modeller, he said, “Tell me, if the brass could speak, on what would it pride itself?” And when the young man replied, “On its beauty.”