On Drunkenness (166-170)

But sober reasoning does not admit these things, but only that reasoning does so which is overcome with wine, and, as it were, drunk.

for the great darkness which is spread over all existing bodies and things does not permit one to see the real nature of each thing, but even if any one, under the influence of immoderate curiosity or of a real love of learning, wishes to emerge from ignorance and to obtain a closer view, he, like people wholly deprived of sight, stumbling over what is before his feet, will fall, and so get behind hand before he can lay hold of anything; or else, snatching at something with his hands, [*]

For even if education, holding a torch to the mind, conducts it on his way, kindling its own peculiar light, it would still, with reference to the perception of existing things, do harm rather than good; for a slight light is naturally liable to be extinguished by dense darkness, and when the light is extinguished all power of seeing is useless.

Accordingly we must, on these accounts, remind the man who gives himself airs by reason of his power of deliberating, or of wisely choosing one kind of objects and avoiding others, that if the same unalterable perceptions of the same things always occurred to us, it might perhaps be requisite to admire the two faculties of judging which are implanted in us by nature, namely, the outward senses and the intellect, as unerring and incorruptible, and never to doubt or hesitate about anything, but trusting in every first appearance to choose one kind of thing and to reject the contrary kind.

But since we are found to be influenced in different manners by the same things at different times, we should have nothing positive to assert about anything, inasmuch as what appears has no settled or stationary existence, but is subject to various, and multiform, and ever-recurring changes.