Plato Quotes

The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement.

The seen is the changing, the unseen is the unchanging.

Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.

... Societies aren t made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters, by turning the scale one way or another, determine the direction of the whole.

But tell me, this physician of whom you were just speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees, or a healer of the sick?

Prefer diligence before idleness, unless you esteem rust above brightness.

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

Ignorance is the root cause of all difficulties.

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly.

SOCRATES: Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us that we are mistaken in preferring justice to injustice. THRASYMACHUS: And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced by what I have just said; what more can I do for you? Would you have me put the proof bodily into your souls?

Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong ... And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.

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

Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom.

The passionate are like men standing on their heads, they see all things the wrong way.

The God of Love lives in a state of need.

No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.

We will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.

And tell him it's quite true that the best of the philosophers are of no use to their fellows; but that he should blame, not the philosophers, but those who fail to make use of them.

Those having torches will pass them on to others.

You can remember, a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones.

...in every man there is an eye of the soul, which...is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.

The wisdom of men is worth little or nothing.

And we shall most likely be defeated, and you will most likely be victors in the contest, if you learn so to order your lives as not to abuse or waste the reputation of your ancestors, knowing that to a man who has any self-respect, nothing is more dishonourable than to be honoured, not for his own sake, but on account of the reputation of his ancestors.

He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, to effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.

Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.

From a short-sided view, the whole moving contents of the heavens seemed to them a parcel of stones, earth and other soul-less bodies, though they furnish the sources of the world order.

Love: a grave mental disease.

My good friend, you are a citizen of Athens, a city which is very great and very famous for its wisdom and power - are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?

Other people are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be troubled when that came for which they had all along been eagerly practicing.

Be kind, for everyone is having a hard battle.

Lessons, however, that enter the soul against its will never grow roots and will never be preserved inside it.

Everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.

For good nurture and education implant good constitutions.

Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the gods; desired by those who have no part in him, and precious to those who have the better part in him.

Man's greatest victory is over oneself.

I'm trying to think, don't confuse me with facts.

.. we shall not be properly educated ourselves, nor will the guardians whom we are training, until we can recognise the qualities of discipline, courage, generosity, greatness of mind, and others akin to them, as well as their opposites in all their manifestations.

There still remain three studies suitable for free man. Arithmetic is one of them.

Virtue is a kind of health, beauty and good habit of the soul.

The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of bad men, and, growing like them, to fly from the conversation of the good, and be cut off from them, and cleave to and follow after the company of the bad.

That makes me think, my friend, as I have often done before, how natural it is that those who have spent a long time in the study of philosophy appear ridiculous when they enter the courts of law as speakers. Those who have knocked about in courts and the like from their youth up seem to me, when compared with those who have been brought up in philosophy and similar pursuits, to be as slaves in breeding compared with freemen.

When a man drinks wine at dinner, he begins to be better pleased with himself.

If a man be endowed with a generous mind, this is the best kind of nobility.

Nothing ever is, everything is becoming.

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.

Interference by the three classes with each other s jobs, and interchange of jobs between them, therefore, does the greatest harm to our state, and we are entirely justified in calling it the worst of evils.