Quotes by Plato

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.

Love is a grave mental disease.

To do injustice is more disgraceful than to suffer it.

The essence of knowledge is self-knowledge.

The worst form of injustice is pretended justice.

Money-makers are tiresome company, as they have no standard but cash value.

A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things.

All learning has an emotional base.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

The wisest have the most authority.

Knowledge is true opinion.

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

We are twice armed if we fight with faith.

No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.

What of his beard? Are you not of Homer's opinion, who says Youth is most charming when the beard first appears?

I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning.

Complacent ignorance is the most lethal sickness of the soul.

Of all the animals, the boy is most unmanageable.

Behold! human beings living in a underground den ... Like ourselves ... they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

The greatest privilege of a human life is to become a midwife to the awakening of the Soul in another person.

Cunning is but the low mimic of wisdom.

Human behavior flows from three main sources desire, emotion, and knowledge.

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.

The true physician is also a ruler having the human body as a subject, and is not a mere money-maker.

He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden.

The love of man to woman is a thing common and of course, and at first partakes more of instinct and passion than of choice; but true friendship between man and man is infinite and immortal.

As such, it describes a relationship that falls short -- for whatever reason, of the fuller communion of romantic sexual love.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Desires are only the lack of something: and those who have the greatest desires are in a worse condition than those who have none, or very slight ones.

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.

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.

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

There are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are really statesmen.

The music masters familiarize children's minds with rhythms and melodies, thus making them more civilized, more balanced, better adjusted in themselves, and more capable in whatever they say or do, for rhythm and harmony are essential to the whole of life.

My meaning is, that any state of action or passion implies previous action or passion. It does not become because it is becoming, but it is in a state of becoming because it becomes; neither does it suffer because it is in a state of suffering, but it is in a state of suffering because it suffers.

Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.

Fields and trees are not willing to teach me anything; but this can be effected by men residing in the city.

And a democracy, I suppose, comes into being when the poor, winning the victory, put to death some of the other party, drive out others, and grant the rest of the citizens an equal share in both citizenship and offices.

To be curious about that which is not one's concern while still in ignorance of oneself is ridiculous.

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.

The only real ill-doing is the deprivation of knowledge.

Do you mean that the tyrant will dare to use violence against the people who fathered him, and raise his hand against them if they oppose him? So the tyrant is a parricide, and little comfort to his old parent.

Conversion is not implanting eyes, for they exist already; but giving them a right direction, which they have not.

To him who disgraces his family life is no life, and to such a person there is no one a friend, neither while living nor when dead.

Time on its back bears all things far away -- Full many a challenge is wrought by many a day -- Shape, fortune, name, and nature all decay.

I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency.

True friendship can exist only between equals.

They assembled together and dedicated these as the first-fruits of their love to Apollo in his Delphic temple, inscribing there those maxims which are on every tongue- 'know thyselP and 'Nothing overmuch.'

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

Geometry will draw the soul toward truth and create the spirit of philosophy.

Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.

By the golden chain Homer meant nothing else than the sun.

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 tyranny imposed on the soul by anger, or fear, or lust, or pain, or envy, or desire, I generally call 'injustice.'

The only thing worse than suffering an injustice is committing an injustice.

No man will survive who genuinely opposes you or any other crowd and prevents the occurrence of many unjust and illegal happenings in the city. A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.

Ideas are the source of all things.

The poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage.

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.

Necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.

That the makers of laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests.

I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia--by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best.

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.

Thus does the Muse herself move men divinely inspired, and through them thus inspired a Chain hangs together of others inspired divinely likewise.

Music is a defining element of character.

Health is a consumation of a love affair of all the organs of the body.

Through obedience learn to command.

Between knowledge of what really exists and ignorance of what does not exist lies the domain of opinion. It is more obscure than knowledge, but clearer than ignorance.

Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.

The physician, to the extent he is a physician, considers only the good of the patient in what he prescribes, and his own not at all.

The ultimate design of the Mysteries ... was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, ... a perfect enjoyment of intellectual spiritual good.

Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?

And what do you say of lovers of wine... they are glad of any pretext of drinking any wine.

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

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.

Nothing could be more important than that the work of a soldier is well done. No tools will make a man a skilled workmen, or master of defense, or be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them and has never bestowed any attention on them.

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.

We've heard many people say and have often said ourselves that justice is doing one's own work and not meddling with what isn't one's own ... Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work-provided that it comes to be in a certain way-is justice.

He who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself.

For, let me tell you that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me are the pleasure and charm of conversation.

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

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

The Paphian Queen to Cnidos made repair Across the tide to see her image there: Then looking up and round the prospect wide, When did Praxiteles see me thus? she cried.

Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors.

The wolf cares not, how many the sheep be.

We are bound to our bodies like an oyster to its shell.

The most important stage of any enterprise is the beginning.

A State would be happy where philosophers were kings, or kings philosophers.

Upon consideration of the central question of the moon's toughness there can be little doubt. It is hella tough.

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.

This and no other is the root from
which a tyrant springs; when he
first appears he is a protector.