“He was a man, which, as Plato saith, is a very inconstant creature.”

On the Tranquillity of the Mind
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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Plutarch251

ancient Greek historian and philosopher 46–127

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“He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.”

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Context: If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again. Caught in a hand which does not love its kind, it will turn to an insignificant, ugly thing, that can neither flash nor fly.
The best way with music, I imagine, is not to bring the forces of our intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part of us for whose it exists. We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed. He who will be a man, and will not be a child, must — he cannot help himself — become a little man, that is, a dwarf. He will, however, need no consolation, for he is sure to think himself a very large creature indeed.
If any strain of my "broken music" make a child's eyes flash, or his mother's grow for a moment dim, my labour will not have been in vain.