Plato Quotes

We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

The one who learns and learns and doesn't practice is like the one who plows and plows and never plants.

Hence it is from the representation of things spoken by means of posture and gesture that the whole of the art of dance has been elaborated.

The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; and these, it is said, are of the greatest service or of the greatest injury to the dead man, at the very beginning of his journey hither.

Don't quarrel with your parents even if you are on the right.

No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils.

Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument.

The Earth is like one of those balls made of twelve pieces of skin.

That a guardian should require another guardian to take care of him is ridiculous indeed.

Not by force shall the children learn, but through play

Seven years of silent inquiry are needful for a man to learn the truth, but fourteen in order to learn how to make it known to his fellow-men.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Pleasure is the bait of sin

Let early education be a sort of amusement. You will then be better able to find out the natural bent.

We obtain better knowledge of a person during one hour's play and games than by conversing with him for a whole year

Music has the capacity to touch the innermost reaches of the soul and music gives flight to the imagination.

Excess of liberty, whether it lies in state or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

The proud man is forsaken of God.

Wine fills the heart with courage.

The soul is like a pair of winged horses and a charioteer joined in natural union.

. . . Then anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who receives it, in the belief that such writing will be clear and certain, must be exceedingly simple-minded. . . .

It's like this, I think: the excellence of a good body doesn't make the soul good, but the other way around: the excellence of a good soul makes the body as good as it can be.

So 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.

He whom loves touches not walks in darkness.

You ought not attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you attempt to cure the body without the soul.

A nation will prosper to the degree that it honors it's teachers.

The qualities which a man seeks in his beloved are those characteristics of his own soul, whether he knows it or not.

In good speaking, should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is to speak.

I will prove by my life that my critics are liars.

To be at once exceedingly wealthy and good is impossible.

Even the gods love jokes.

The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate it for the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole.

Cooking is a form of flattery....a mischievous, deceitful, mean and ignoble activity, which cheats us by shapes and colors, by smoothing and draping.

Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?

Better to complete a small task well, than to do much imperfectly.

No evil can happen to a good man either in life or after death.

Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?

No one ever dies an atheist.

That's what education should be," I said, "the art of orientation. Educators should devise the simplest and most effective methods of turning minds around. It shouldn't be the art of implanting sight in the organ, but should proceed on the understanding that the organ already has the capacity, but is improperly aligned and isn't facing the right way.

Because it is correct to make a priority of young people, taking care that they turn out as well as possible.

Trees and fields tell me nothing: men are my teachers.

In an honest man there is always something of a child.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.

The disposition of noble dogs is to be gentle with people they know and the opposite with those they don't know...How, then, can the dog be anything other than a lover of learning since it defines what's its own and what's alien.

Renouncing the honors at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth... and to the maximum of power, I exhort all other men to do the same.

There is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink.

Ignorance: the root of all evil.