Plato Quotes
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If we are to keep our flock at the highest pitch of excellence, there should be as many unions of the best of both sexes, and as few of the inferior as possible, and that only the offspring of the better unions should be kept.
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Observe that open loves are held to be more honourable than secret ones, and that the love of the noblest and highest, even if their persons are less beautiful than others, is especially honourable.
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People too smart to get involved in politics are doomed to live in societies run by people who aren't.
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Few men are so obstinate in their atheism, that a pressing danger will not compel them to acknowledgment of a divine power.
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Wise men speak because they have something to say.
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Even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.
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Conversion is not implanting eyes, for they exist already; but giving them a right direction, which they have not.
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Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.
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Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.
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Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.
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Because, unlike courage and wisdom, which made our state brave and wise by being present in a particular part of it, discipline operates by being diffused throughout the whole of it. It produces a concord between its strongest and weakest and middle elements, whether you define them by the standard of good sense, or of strength, or of numbers or money or the like. And so we are quite justified in regarding discipline as this sort of natural harmony and agreement between higher and lower about which of them is to rule in state and individual.
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Beauty is a natural superiority.
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There is nothing so delightful as the hearing, or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of the man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive.
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If a man be endowed with a generous mind, this is the best kind of nobility.
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Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers.
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True friendship can exist only between equals.
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As there are misanthropists or haters of men, so also are there misologists, or haters of ideas.
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Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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Whenever a person strives, by the help of dialectic, to start in pursuit of every reality by a simple process of reason, independent of all sensuous information - never flinching, until by an act of the pure intelligence he has grasped the real nature of good - he arrives at the very end of the intellectual world.
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Man is the plumeless genus of bipeds, birds are the plumed.
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I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.
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Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.