Plato Quotes

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet

Be kind, because everyone is having a really hard time.

If it were necessary either to do wrong or to suffer it, I should choose to suffer rather than do it.

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.

It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.

The tools that would teach men their own use would be beyond price.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.

In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.

Then we got into a labyrinth, and, when we thought we were at the end,came out again at the beginning, having still to see as much as ever.

Haven't you noticed that opinion without knowledge is always a poor thing? At the best it is blind—isn't anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding like a blind man on the right road?

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.

The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many.

Necessity who is the mother of our invention.

To be is to do.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child's natural bent.

The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines.

Justice is useful when money is useless.

States are as the men are they grow out of human characters.

Then we shan’t regard anyone as a lover of knowledge or wisdom who is fussy about what he studies…

The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.

The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.

[On the virtuous man] "He combines the highest, lowest and middle chords in complete harmony within himself.

All is flux, nothing stays still

I thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not, while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.

I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth…. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?”t“Not in the first generation,” he said, “but you might succeed with the second, and later generations.

Because a freeman ought not to be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind. Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

All learning has an emotional base.

...in the running of cities, virtually nothing is done by anyone that is conducive to political health, nor is there a single ally with whom one might go to the aid of justice and still remain alive; it would be a case of a solitary human among wild animals, neither wanting to join in their depredations nor able to stand alone against their collective savagery, dead before he'd done any good to his city or friends and useless both to himself and everybody else. Once a person has made all these calculations, he keeps his peace and minds his own business, like someone withdrawing from the prevailing wind into the shelter of a wall in a storm of dust or rain, and as he sees everyone else filling themselves full of lawlessness he is content if he himself can somehow live out life here untainted by injustice and impious actions, and leave it with fine hopes and in a spirit of kindness and good will.

And yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Then as for those who gaze upon many beautiful things but don't see the beautiful itself, and aren't even capable of following someone else who leads them to it, and upon many just things but not the just itself, and all the things like that, we'll claim that they accept the seeming of everything but discern nothing of what they have opinions about.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.

And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.

The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his sneses, and the mind is no longer in him.

There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man, who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters both.

A dog has the soul of a philosopher.

One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Philosophy is the highest music.

You take the words in the sense which is most damaging to the argument.

If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.

virtue does not spring from riches, but riches and all other human blessings, both private and public, from virtue.

Wise men talk because they have something to say; Fools, because they have to say something.

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depend upon himself and not upon other men has adopted the very best plan for living happily.

...when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.

The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.

Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.

I am smart because I know I nothing.

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.

He who wishes to serve his country must have not only the power to think, but the will to act

If there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him.

It is only just that anything that grows up on its own should feel it has nothing to repay for an upbringing which it owes no one.

Those who don't know must learn from those who do.