Plato Quotes

He who is learning and learning and doesn't apply what he knows is like the one who is plowing and plowing and doesn't seed.

Of all the things which a man has, next to the gods his soul is the most divine and most truly his own.

Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Where it is a general rule that it is wrong to gratify lovers, this can be attributed to the defects of those who make that rule: the government's lust for rule and the subjects' cowardice.

Maximize the power of the beliefs that strengthen you and neutralize those that weaken you.

I can show you that the art of calculation has to do with odd and even numbers in their numerical relations to themselves and to each other.

Do thine own work, and know thyself.

In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these means, man can attain perfection.

But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Justice means minding one's own business and not meddling with other men's concerns.

The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist... what that man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

As there are misanthropists or haters of men, so also are there misologists, or haters of ideas.

Let every man remind their descendants that they also are soldiers who must not desert the ranks of their ancestors, or from cowardice fall behind.

Where reverence is, there is fear; for he who has a feeling of reverence and shame about the commission of any action, fears and is afraid of an ill reputation.

A good decision is based on knowledge, and not on numbers.

Complacent ignorance is the most lethal sickness of the soul

It is through geometry that one purifies the eye of the soul.

Neither do the ignorant love wisdom or desire to become wise; for this is the grievous thing about ignorance, that those who are neither good nor beautiful think they are good enough, and do not desire that which they do not think they are lacking.

By education I mean that training in excellence from youth upward which makes a man passionately desire to be a perfect citizen, and teaches him to rule, and to obey, with justice. This is the only education which deserves the name.

As a breath of wind or some echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns to the source from which it issued, so the stream of beauty passes back into its possessor through his eyes, which is its natural route to the soul; arriving there and setting him all aflutter, it waters the passages of the feathers and causes the wings to grow, and fills the soul of the loved one in his turn with love.

I fear this is not the right exchange to attain virtue, to exchange pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains and fears for fears, the greater for the less like coins, but that the only valid currency for which all these things should be exchanged is wisdom.

Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.

Vision, in my view, is the cause of the greatest benefit to us, inasmuch as none of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heavens. But as it is, the vision of day and night and of months and circling years has created the art of number and has given us not only the notion of Time but also means of research into the nature of the Universe. From these we have procured Philosophy in all its range, than which no greater boon ever has come or will come, by divine bestowal, unto the race of mortals.

It is as expedient that a wicked man be punished as that a sick man be cured by a physician; for all chastisement is a kind of medicine.

According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves.

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

For it is obvious to everybody, I think, that this study [of astronomy] compels the soul to look upward and leads it away from things here to higher things.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.

My plainness of speech makes people hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth.

If you ask: What is the good of education? The answer is easy: Education makes good men and good men act nobly.

The right question is usually more important than the right answer.

And when one of them meets the other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment.

He who gives himself to a lover because he is a good man, and in the hope that he will be improved by his company, shows himself to be virtuous, even though the object of his affection turn out to be a villain, and to have no virtue; and if he is deceived he has committed a noble error. For he has proved that for his part he will do anything for anybody with a view to virtue and improvement, than which there can be nothing nobler.

Better a good enemy than a bad friend.

The choice of souls was in most cases based on their own experience of a previous life... Knowledge easily acquired is that which the enduing self had in an earlier life, so that it flows back easily.

Mariner, do not ask whose tomb this may be, but go with good fortune: I wish you a kinder sea.

A true artist is someone who gives birth to a new reality.

No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.

...that not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued.

Music is a defining element of character.

The people always have some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. ... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency

Those who have a natural talent for calculation are generally quick-witted at every other kind of knowledge; and even the dull, if they have had an arithmetical training, although they may derive no other advantage from it, always become much quicker than they would have been.

When two friends are in the mood to chat, we have to go about it in a gentler and more dialectical way. By 'more dialectical,' I mean not only that we give real responses, but that we base our responses solely on what the interlocutor admits that he himself knows.